Ubergeek Poll: Borland JBuilder [?]

In My Humble Opinion
1
      • I have been through a few programming classes, but am not employed in the field so far. I note that many positions ask for Sun Java experience or knowledge. I already have MS J++, but it doesn’t help much in that regard as it is. I can get JBuilder Professional at a pretty deep student discount. Is JBuilder a good way to learn how to use Sun Java stuff such as Swing and web apps? JBuilder and Vis J++ seem to be the big two. Are there any other RADs that are fairly common in the industry, use Sun Java, and are in the $500 or less price range? - MC
2

JBuilder is the best Java IDE I’ve seen, and I use it every day. I’ve evaluated WebGain’s Visual Cafe, IBM’s Visual Age, and a couple of other half-IDEs, but none of them really come close to JBuilder for ease of use, performance, and power.

Vis J++ from MS is an old product now, frozen about two years ago when the legal stuff between Sun and Microsoft was going on. It’s a couple of versions of the JDK behind - I wouldn’t even install it now.

JBuilder’s Foundation version is US$50 - to quote from their site:

“JBuilder 4 Foundation is the Pure Java 2 cross-platform development environment for learning Java programming. It includes an integrated editor, debugger, compiler, visual designers, wizards, tutorials and more.”

This sounds like the version which would suit you. I’d recommend though that you spend a few days playing around with the command line versions of the JDK - javac the compiler and java the runtime engine. This will give you a feel for what’s happening. IDEs tend to hide the underlying stuff, so it’s worth the time to see how to structure packages, where your class files go, and so on.

Oh, and JBuilder is written in java, so it will run on any platform that supports a JDK. Good luck!

3

I’ve used JBuilder, and found it unsufferably slow. Though that was probably at least partly due to the system it was on.

I don’t like IDEs. My preferred dev environment is emacs and javac.

4

I’ll agree that JBuilder is one of the nicer IDEs out there, but none of the IDEs are good for learning Swing, etc. They hide too many of the fundamentals. A powerful text editor such as emacs is good, but I prefer something in between the two. A nice java editor that has syntax highlighting and does the smart indenting, such as jcreator.

They don’t hide anything from you, but make it easy to find mistakes in code, since the highlighting won’t kick in. As Marcus said, once you have the fundies down, you can pick any environment that suits you.

5
      • I did this at one point, after I found a couple of cheap Sun/Java programming books. My feel was rather tedious, because it didn’t do anything automatically at all. I played with it for about three days, and then got tired of typing for twenty minutes for each 5 seconds I got to watch the program do anything interesting. -Simple files can still be used in IDE’s, and I will be able to say I have some experience with one more piece of software.
        ~Also I won’t pay anybody for “educational” software, necessary stuff is usually left out. -Like saving output code. - MC
6

I agree with TheNerd and DMC, that the best way to learn how Java really works is to do it ‘by hand’. Visual builders do too much for you, and are notorious for generating inefficient code. I’m an old mainframe guy, so my editor of choice is SPF/SE, since it has the look&feel of a TSO editor, but also colorizes for several different languages. If I’m just doing light editing I’ll use vi since it is available on all our platforms. We use javac to build the java bits, and make files for the C/C++. The only time I fire up Microsoft DevStudio is if I need the debugger.