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Rubbing salt in: JBuilder What's the score?

 
Greenhorn
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Hi all,
Okay, I realise (realize) that Sun has a bit of a "tiff" with Microsoft, but what is the deal with the Jbuilder? I've heard that people are adamantly against it. Why?
I mean I've never used the Jbuilder. Heck, I don't ever really know what it is. I imagine that it's something like visual age. I just know that a lot of the people I work with prefer it. I don't know why. Can someone give me an objective perspective on this one?
Mark
 
Ranch Hand
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JBuilder is a nice program, but its HUGE and runs like a pig on my PIII/350Mhz with 128 megs.
The recommendation for the CattleDrive to not use an IDE is so that you don't either a crutch to help you out or extra junk put in your code.
I cannot make a recommendation for an IDE.
Bruce.
 
Ranch Hand
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It's huge and it takes up so much memory , it runs damn too slow on my machine, I never use it. I stick with a simple editor. Plus IDE's produce bad code which is later unmanagible to work with.
 
"The Hood"
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Plus they package some of the code in BORLAND packages, so when I go to implement an application at my Not Borland company, the packages are no longer industry standard naming conventions, and my customer company complains, and I get to re-align the package names are re-compile everything, yuck
 
Ranch Hand
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i went to the borland site to download jbuilder and filled in
all the on-line forms to do so. you have to "join" the "borland
community" to get to the download area. they then asked if i
wanted to be sent email ads and such, i said no. finally, after a few screens of questions, at the end they said i couldn't
download jbuilder unless i agreed to be sent junk email ads (or
whatever it was they called it).
kinda' ticked me off.
i've since discovered jEdit over at http://sourceforge.net/
it's a simple editor written in java. that "metal" look is just
the coolest.
 
Ranch Hand
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I happen to have JBuilder (version 3).
The computer I use is a 500 MHz machine (128M RAM).
I'm not a software professional...mostly just a computer science student or part-time programmer.
With that framework established, here's my perspective:
I am rather surprised at how long JBuilder takes to load on my computer. Of course you only load it once each time you use it (theoretically). Bottom line...yes, it is a big program.
The above comments are basically on the mark and I don't disagree with them. I don't like to write my programs with JBuilder; I don't like the code it produces and when I write my own code I don't find the JBuilder's built-in editor to be particularly "user-friendly".
I much prefer to write my code in TextPad (a wonderful shareware program that costs only $27 register...and worth every cent). Although I can compile java programs within TextPad, it isn't designed for extensive debugging. So, when I need to do some "heavy-duty" debugging of my Java programs, that's about the only time I pull out the JBuilder so I can step through the code and watch the variables, etc. Beyond that, I stay out of JBuilder (or any other IDE for that matter).
I've been rather surprised (disappointed) at how often JBuilder has locked up on my computer. Or is it just so slow that I am mistakenly thinking it's locked up. Whatever. There is now a JBuilder 4. I can only assume it is even "bigger." Hopefully it is more reliable. But I'm not running out to buy it just yet.
Hope this helps.
Allen
[This message has been edited by Allen Alchian (edited February 26, 2001).]
 
Wanderer
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Looking at the very first message in this thread - what does Sun vs. Microsoft have to do with JBuilder? The latter is made by Borland (formerly Inprise, formerly Borland) and has nothing to do with Microsoft or Sun. Well, other than using Sun's language of course.
Anyway, I was the last one in my office to jump on the JBuilder bandwagon, but I'm glad I did. Disclaimer: I don't have a lot of experience with IDE's in general, so there could well be something better out there which I simply haven't tried. Previously I did most all my work with Sun's SDK and either Lemmy (a nice vi clone for the PC) or TextPad (which I also heartily recommend). Whenever I used JBuilder 3.5 it tended to annoy me with some minor random bug - however with the release of JBuilder 4 most of my troubles seem to have gone away. Yes, it is slow to load, and takes a fair chunk of memory, but if your machine is up to it, it's worth it. My work machine does fairly well with 128MB and 400 MHz, as long as I don't try to run too many other programs ar the same time. My favorite features are those that allow me to find things quickly in a large project - e.g. when I compile and get a list of errors, I can click on the error message, and JBuilder takes me straight to the code in question, ready to edit it. Similarly, I can tell it to find all instances of a particular string, and by clicking on the list I can go straight to the code it references. And if I see a symbol I don't recognize, I can right click to "Browse Symbol" and it takes me straight to the source code for the appropriate class, method, or whatever the symbol references. Sure, you can do without these conveniences, but on a big project they can really come in handy.
Note that JBuilder 4 Foundation edition is free, and contrary to John Gabriele's experience I was able to download it from Borland without receiving any junk mail from them. Yes, you do have to supply them with an e-mail address, but there is an option to decline any promotional e-mail from them, and thus far it seems to have worked. I haven't received anything from them other than the licence key they mailed me. I think it's worth the time to download and check it out. Good luck.
 
Greenhorn
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As a recent computer science graduate, my only experience with Java had been using NotePad. However, when I was hired to program full-time, I was given a computer loaded up with JBuilder 4 and for the enormous applications I work on, I find it invaluable. For exactly the same extras already mentioned, JBuilder is great. When I need to reference methods from a class that I'm unfamiliar with, it provides me with a popup of all the methods and parameters of theses methods. Without this, I cannot imagine how long it would take someone to become functional in an application that includes minimally, 500 classes.
For people working on smaller applications, I understand sticking with a simple editor But when you get to enormous programs that would otherwise take months and months to learn, JBuilder is great.
 
Consider Paul's rocket mass heater.
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