JBuilder 2005 Productivity Features

This is the log of the chat room for the live audio chat from November 22, 2004 on productivity features in JBuilder 2005 with Christian Kemper, JBuilder Architect and Mark Howe, Senior R&D Engineer.

Note: This log is only the chat room transcript. There is much additional information covered in the audio replay that is not available in this chat log.  For all previous and upcoming live chats, see http://bdntv.borland.com/chat.html.

jkaster: davidi: "Does JB2k5 support all of the Martin Fowler refactorings? Does JB2k5 support any automatic refactorings?" - I don't think anyone covers all of the refactorings. There's always new ones coming up too, and ones specific to java. We do cover what we think are the most important ones.
jkaster: yogi: "elaborating on john's question, is there some interface that needs to be implemented or some particular manager you need to register w/ to implement a distributed refactoring?" - mainly Borland refactorings right now
jkaster: davidi: "are the "Code Audits" in JB2k5 the same ones that come with Together products?" - the engine came from the together product. we needed up update it to JDK 5.0
jkaster: davidi: "what is your most favorite new feature in JBuilder 2005?" - Christian: I really like the new CodeInsight. Mark:Team Refactorings
jkaster: davidi: "Does JBuilder R&D team use Optimizeit to speed up JBuilder?" - constantly!
jkaster: davidi: "One review I read (PC Magazine) said JBuilder was "a code-centered environment" and BEA Workshop and Sun's Java Studio Creator were more visual - can't JBuilder be both?" - Sure it can, and it is in certain places, such as in the EJB deisgner. We just don't hide the code from the developer.
jkaster: doychin: "what do you think about changing structure view for a class to look the way it is done in vs.net where you can browse the methods a fields into parent classes? after that there could be added functions like "override method"" - not familiar with VS.NET, but we allow you to sort methods by method hierarchy (and other ways)
jkaster: doychin: "What about adding to some code audits similar feature like ErrorInsight where you can right click and select how problem to be solved?" - sometimes it's hard to know what's wrong but it's something we're thinking about
jkaster: davidi: "JB2k5 supports J2EE 1.3, when (and how) will it support J2EE 1.4?" - technical problems are solved. will be before the next major release
jkaster: davidi: "why doesn't Borland open source the PrimeTime IDE framework and the OTA?" - We wanted to do this, but it is not as simple as it sounds. Certainly still a possibility. Provide feedback for us if you think it's interesting to you.
jkaster: doychin: "will we see more of jb ide code as samples for writing open tool stuff? for example how to use jam and jom? Also I'm personally interested in examples of how to write designers or other stuff." - writing designers is tough, and we saw that in this release. The designer surface has changed under the hood in this release.
jkaster: davidi: "Are there any compatibility issues in moving JBX projects/code to JB2k5?" - Not that we know of.
jkaster: davidi: "Does JB2K5 have Ant 1.6.2 or some other 1.6 version?" - Will have to answer for another chat.
jkaster: davidi: "JB2k5 has some support for code visualization - but does not support full UML modeling - and there is no Together Ediition yet?" - That will be a role provided by the Themis project, as we announced at BorCon.
jkaster: davidi: "Do either Mark or Christian have a favorite JSR that is being worked on?" - Christian: JSR 14 was mine, on generics. 199 is interesting, too Mark: 199 also
aohlsson inserts the following link: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/all
aohlsson: (all JSRs)
jkaster: doychin: "As part of distributed refactoring what you think about doing them on different branches of one project?" - they can probably be applied
jkaster: doychin: "follow-up about j2ee 1.4:i think there is checboxes for ejb 2.1 for example you just need the app server that have support for it" - yeah, that's one of the issues to have it resolved.
aohlsson: yogi: "this is from the bundled ant's debug output: Apache Ant version 1.6.2 compiled on July 16 2004" - thanks
jkaster: davidi: "Are you interested in Aspect Oriented Programming for Java? (Aspect/J had a plug-in for JBuilder9)" - I'm not sure if AOP is mainstream enough for us to provide this feature.
jkaster: doychin: "yes different branches of the same project on VCS" - thanks for clarification
jkaster: davidi: "Are there any issues with using open source in JBuilder (ANT, JUnit, etc)? Do you give back enhancements to the community?" - Yes, we do check changes back in, like the XML tools. JUnit wasn't much of a problem.
jkaster: davidi: "How about adding "Design by Contract" by Bertrand Meyer to JBuilder? JContractor (http://jcontractor.sourceforge.net/) is an open source project that adds this to Java." - Christian was a member of the expert group for the asserts, and most members wanted DBC
jkaster: doychin: "no if I change somthing in one branche I want to applay same refactoring into another branch which is for example for another customer but refactorings does not brake the brancehs and all these withouth having to use for example diffutility to merge changes from one branch into another" - That's not currently supported, but this is an interesting concept that we will explore
jkaster: davidi: "Does anyone in the JBuilder team use JBuilder on a computer other than Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS?" - Not that we're aware of, currently.
jkaster: davidi: "WebSphere. Application Server V6.0 will come out at the end of the year - is it hard to add application server integrations after a version of JB ships?" - it's not hard for us. It just takes time. Will ask Shelby this one.
jkaster: davidi: "Is there anything new in JB2K5 for Web Services/SOA?" - Yes! Follow up for Ravi Kumar's chat.
jkaster: doychin: "Formatting settings for blank lines betin import lines has changed and when you return back a project from 2k5 to X you all blankline syou expect are not there ;-)" - please report this to QC
jkaster: davidi: "How big is JBuilder - # of lines of code, # of packages - ???" - Pretty big! JBuilder itself is huge. We develop JBuilder with JBuilder.
jkaster: davidi: "Does the JBuilder Team use CaliberRM and StarTeam?" - Oh yeah, we do. We are strong believers in "eating our own dog food."
jkaster: davidi: "What does the JBuilder team use for automated testing?" - JUnit and automated server testing when possible.

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doychin: thank you for the nice chat
lhochet: thanks, great it was