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An In-Depth Look at One of the Highest-Rated Java Development Environments
Borland Software Corporation, formerly Inprise Corporation, announced the availability of version 5 of their JBuilder product on June 4, 2001 at the JavaOne Developers Conference. For those unfamiliar with it, JBuilder is Borland's development environment for Java.
Java is the cross platform programming language developed by Sun Microsystems Inc. It has been carefully designed to be platform independent and, in it's original format, was an interpreted language. Programs were processed by an application called a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVMs had to be written specifically for each computer and operating system on which you wanted to run Java. However, once you wrote. a JVM that complied with Sun Microsystems Java specification, you could run any Java application on it, no matter which physical machine and operating system it was written on. This concept still holds true today, but it has been augmented with a variety of just-in-time compilers to accelerate program execution speeds.
JBuilder is one of the highest rated Java development environments. It has received numerous awards, including the 2001 JavaWorld Editor's Choice Award for JBuilder 4 Enterprise edition; JAVAPro Reader's Choice Award for Most Valuable Product for JBuilder 4; JAVAPro Reader's
Choice Award for Best Team Development Tool for JBuilder 4 Enterprise edition; JAVAPro Reader's Choice Award for Best Development Suite for Java for Borland Enterprise Studio, Java Edition; and a slew of other awards from organizations and publications.
As with previous versions, JBuilder 5 is packaged in several configurations. Ranked in order of increasing capability and cost, the current four versions are Personal ($9.95 CD only/$99.95 CD with printed documentation), Professional ($999), Enterprise ($2,399), and Borland Enterprise Studio with JBuilder 5 ($6,999). The Personal edition is sold primarily to those wanting to learn Java and use it in non-commercial environment. The
Professional edition adds tools for Web and data base development, as well as XML support and tools for deploying commercial applications. The Enterprise edition continues this growth in development power and includes support for application servers and a variety of the leading version control systems for team development. The most powerful package, Borland Enterprise Studio, Java Edition, provides multi-tier development support and includes Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev4,...