JDJ 10-1.indd - sys-con.com's archive of magazines - SYS-CON Media

LabsJBuilder 2005by Borland Software CorporationReviewed byKen SipeKen Sipe is the CEO andfounder of Code Mentor, Inc.He provides coding, mentoring,and training in OOAD andJava technologies. In addition,Ken is an internationallyrecognized speaker in the fieldof distributed computing,speaking often at JavaOne,NFJS, and BorCon.kensipe@codementor.netThere is an old joke in whicha man is seen coming from aconservation area with a heftycatch of fish. After noticing theproficiency of the fisherman whenothers had come back empty-handed,a park ranger decides to tag alongwith him. When they get to a specificlocation, the fisherman lights a stickof dynamite and throws it in the water,retrieving a huge quantity of fish.While the ranger begins to explainthe illegal nature of the fisherman’sactions, the man lights another stick,hands it to the ranger, and says, “Doyou want to talk?…or do you want tofish?” Borland, with JBuilder, seems toask a similar question, “Do you wantto play, arrange, and mess with yourdevelopment environment?…or doyou want to code?”It isn’t possible to provide anin-depth review of all of JBuilder’sfeatures in this short article. Whilepreparing to write this review, I downloadedJBuilder 2005’s feature matrixand found it was 32 pages! This articlereviews JBuilder 2005 Enterprise Edition,which was released to the publicAugust 2004. However, since I was inthe group of beta testers, I had usedJBuilder 2005 for several months priorto its public release.Editor FeaturesSignificant improvements can befound in the editor. MemberInsighthas been updated to become SmartMemberInsight. Instead of the dropdowndisplaying all methods for agiven object, it’s filtered to the mostlikely candidates. This can be very confusingat first and takes some gettinguse to. Depressing ctl+h will expandthe filtered list to all possibilities. Keymappings can be adjusted to providethe previous behavior.ErrorInsight is fairly new in JBuilderand provides a welcomed approachto agile development. Essentially, anyerrors written in code will be highlightedby ErrorInsight flags. Alt+enterinvokes the ErrorInsight to provideoptions; for example, when used witha TDD approach, referencing classesthat don’t exist yet causes JBuilder toask if it should search for the referenceor create a new class. Similarly,if a method is used that throws anexception, the provided options (dependingon code location) are “AddThrows Clause,” “Add Catch Clause,”and “Surround with Try/Catch” (seeFigure 1).Development help can also begleaned from code audit. This newfeature highlights potential concerns.For instance, a comparison of twostrings with the “==” operator is usuallya mistake. With code audits, thiscode is highlighted with a descriptionof the issue. This feature can get annoyingdepending on code style. Forinstance, it complains that code afteran if statement needs to be in a codebody. Each of these audits can be configuredon a project-by-project basis,but again illustrates another deficiency:there doesn’t appear to be a way toexport and import preferred audit listsfor a department so it can be used inanother project. Hopefully this will beextended in the future to work like ErrorInsight.If the tool knows that codeaudit’s preference is to put code in acode block after an if statement, whydoesn’t it assist with that? This is stilla welcome feature though as manyFigure 1 ErrorInsight exampleBorland Software Corporation100 Enterprise WayScotts Valley, CA 95066-3249Phone: 800 632-2864E-mail: customer_service@borland.comWeb: www.borland.comSpecifications PlatformsWindows 2000 – Windows XP, OSX, Solaris 9,Linux (official support for Sun Java Desktop andRed Hat Enterprise Linux 3)PricingEnterprise: new – $3,500; upgrade – $1,900.Developer: new – $500; upgrade – $299.Foundation: free (including for commercial use)Test EnvironmentDell Inspiron 8200, 2GHz Intel P4 processor, 60GBdisk, 1GB of RAM, Windows XPprojects spend thousands of dollarson products for this specific item.It should be mentioned that someof the best features of JBuilder are notintuitively obvious, like intelligentcode editing. For instance, the smartpaste feature, through refactoring,cuts several lines of code and pastesthem in another class, and JBuilderasks if the associated imports shouldbe added.JDK 5A noteworthy must-have forJBuilder 2005 is its support for JDK 5.Provided support includes help iden-48 January 2005www.SYS-CON.com/JDJ