iTechNote

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

CodeGear announced JBuilder 2007 on Monday, 20 Nov. Who is CodeGear? It is a subsidiary of Borland, which is so new that its official web site is not yet ready. The new subsidiary will focus on developer productivity market while its parent company, Borland continues to grow on Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) market.

Just a week after CodeGear is formed, the young company announced the latest JBuilder that is built on Eclipse 3.2.1 core. The “enhanced” version of Eclipse delivers better plug-in management, enhances enterprise customer support and brings JBuilder innovations to Eclipse. CodeGear hopes that by offloading the maintenance of development tools, potential customers are willing to pay a fee to have a peace of mind.

The IDE is carefully crafted to address the software development trend. Open source is more pervasive than ever and development teams are increasingly distributed around the world. The trend creates a need to collaborate among developers. The easiest solution is to integrate collaboration tools right into the IDE. JBuilder 2007 includes TeamInsight, an integrated collaboration portal and Project Assist that extends far beyond just writing codes.

According to Joe McGlynn, the new Project Assist team productivity feature allows you define a developer tool stack for SCM, bug tracking, project planning, requirements and continuous integration builds. It installs all of the components, configures them, and makes it easy to provision projects and users onto the system. A team can be up and running in about 30 minutes, including continuous integration builds and a project portal.

Each member of the team gets an XML file that we use to pre-configure Eclipse for your projects. This allows you to immediately pull/check-in source; and provides live lists of assigned bugs, tasks and features on a project. The team can open and close bugs, create requirements and complete tasks even while offline. Every check-in produces an automatic build, powered by Maven2. Every build collects quality metrics, and these metrics are trended over time.

JBuilder 2007 will be generally available later this quarter. JBuilder Enterprise, Professional and Developer will cost $1,999 (new) $999 (upgrade), $799 (new) $479 (upgrade), and $399 (new) $199 (upgrade) respectively. JBuilder 2007 is initially Windows-only and supports Java EE 5, Java SE 6, EJB 3 and other latest JSRs. However, you will need to use JBuilder 2006 to write codes for Java ME platform and Borland Enterprise Server.

A demo should be available here soon.