Review of JBuilder 2005 Enterprise and Together Developer 2005

As always, Borland has been busy making improvements to their flagship products, JBuilder and Together. These products have the most potential value when used together, so the integration between them is an important feature of both. This review will cover that integration, as well as selected new features of the products. Project Management Both JBuilder and Together now offer code auditing, and Together also provides metrics. In JBuilder, auditing is turned on or off as a property of the project. When turned on, JBuilder audits run automatically during editing, providing a real-time display of results. Running audits or metrics using Together is a discrete operation that produces a report. There is a good deal of overlap between the many audits provided by JBuilder and Together. Where there are differences, audits unique to JBuilder are more implementation related; as one would expect, those unique to Together are more design related. JBuilder provides about 90 audits in 11 categories, Together about 80 in 9 categories. It is useful that each audit can be turned on or off. For example, some of the coding style audits are debatable and may conflict with or exceed a team’s standards. Turning these off will prevent nuisance notifications. Most of the audits in both products are useful and will improve the quality of almost any developer’s code. Some will find errors that could lead to hard to find bugs. JBuilder’s real time auditing can cause performance problems when used during editing of large source files. For example, auditing a file of about 5,000 lines of Java code during editing produced noticeable delays in editor responses even on a 3 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM. Perhaps we should have heeded the “long files” audit that flags source files with more than 2,000 lines!