Borland Enterprise Studio 7 

Enterprise applications demand a single platform though the complete application development lifecycle. Keeping this in mind, Borland launched its latest enterprise studio that any Java developer and architect would like to have. Some of the stellar changes are the improved support for Web services, mobile application development, better UML visualization and Struts framework converter. Plus, the studio supports integration of third party tools such as SunOne application server, XMLSpy and Crystal Reports. 

We got the Studio in a single CD for review and we installed it in Win XP in just 35
mins. You need at least 512 MB of RAM. It is available for Linux and Solaris platforms. We did not receive the installation CD for third party tools and Borland Enterprise Application Server. 

Today the workspace has become easier to work and panes (project, structure, content and file) can be expanded, undocked or
iconified. You can search in any of the panes by selecting it and then typing. The IDE has an option of incremental search too. You can drag file from the file browser pane to the content pane. The Project Properties window has personality configuration option to hide aspects of JBuilder you don't need. 

For testing and measuring application performance, Borland has included its Optimizeit Suite 6.0. Request Analyzer (RA) in this version, which provides profiling of J2EE applications. For example, you can track the type of request coming, resources being used. 

Step 2 of Struts wizard for mapping the form elements

UML support is improved and the look and feel is kept simple. You can customize color for UML display elements such as class, interface and overriding methods. The properties of UML element are displayed as tagged value below the name of superclass and subclass in the diagram. The UML diagram strictly adheres to the UML conventions and you need to know UML in order to take full advantage of Studio.

On the coding front, Web module wizard has been added to create Web applications. JSP TagInsight is added for working with JSP application. Plus, you can convert the Web application to Struts 1.1 framework using the Stuts converter wizard. The wizard offers three visual designers (Action, Form Bean and Tiles) according to the Struts framework-a boost for developers.

J2EE developers can use EJB designer wizard to create EJB 1.1 components. Working with the J2EE deployment descriptors files gets easy with the DD built-in editor. You can also use JBoss server 3.x + for creating enterprise application and JBuilder has a module for this. If you are developing cross platform application such as
CORBA, then JBuilder provides wizard to create CORBA interface, server and client. 

The previous studio version had an import and export wizard for creating Web services. This has been replaced with the Web services designer wizard. This wizard lets you create Web services easily, and create WSDL and generate supporting classes to implement services. It allows importing of Web services from a WSDL URL or UDDI registry. You can also expose EJB as Web service through EJB scanning feature. A good addition is the support for mobile application development. You can create mobile applications using J2ME toolkit 2.0_01 and NTTDoCoMo 1.5 SDK. A mobile application development requires different kind of user interface than AWT or Swing. JBuilder provides UI components for mobile applications. 

Talking about third party tools integration, Crystal Reports, XMLSPY 2004 and
Salesforce.com, the toolkit makes application development faster. The Studio also provides the option of using SunOne Application server 7 through a plug in. Developers can use Crystal Reports design environment for building the presentation layer of a J2EE application while the other layer remains separated. Any change to be made in future in the presentation layer can be made faster with Crystal Reports. You can integrate salesforce.com based on the
CRM-based solutions through the sforce toolkit. 

The Studio is bundled with Borland Enterprise J2EE Application server and StarTeam server 5.2 personal version. The StarTeam server provides a repository for storing software assets such as code, software-change management and tasks to be done. It also facilitates team collaboration for a project. The personal edition lacks feature of workflow creation and management. 

The Bottom Line: Although the IDE meets the need of complete application lifecycle, the cost is large. You can also look for other IDEs with less features and tools such as Eclipse, Visual J# and
NetBeans. 

Sushil Oswal