Kito D. Mann's Blog

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Has Borland seent the light?

I've been a devout fan of Borland's development tools since my pre-teen years (I started programming with Turbo Pascal, downloading code from BBSs). I used Delphi back in the day, and I was a debout JBuilder supporter until about a year or two ago, when I moved to Eclipse.

Even when I was using JBuilder, a friend of mine and I often concluded that Borland should be selling the best suite of Eclipse plugins on the market. While I was glad to see JBuilder 2007 reborn on top of Eclipse, I was intrigued, but not sold. (Granted, I did always love Together, which is integrated, along with OptimizeIt!). Admittedly, part of my resistance was the lack of any additional JSF tooling, which is my primary concern.

With JBuilder 2007, the pricing has come down quite a bit -- the standard version only costs $499, which is squarely aimed at IntelliJ. But Borland has just moved a step closer to the light by introducing JGear, which is basically JBuilder 2007 sold as three separate plugins (plus a server portion for its collaboration tools) that work with existing Eclipse installs. So, if you're using MyEclipse but you want profiling, you can just add JGear Performance. Or, if you're using BEA Workshop, you can add JGear Team client plugin. And the pricing is actually reasonable; the plugins start at $299.

Am I excited? More so than usual. I think Borland really has seen the light. Is it too late? Maybe so. But late is always better than never...

Firefox Interrupted Part 2

So, I've been happily using Opera for a while now. I have applied a cool skin, imported my Firefox bookmarks, created and saved sessions (Opera has session-saving of tabs built-in), and so on.

There are, of course, a few caveats:

• I'm not too fond of the way Opera caches things. For normal browsing this is fine, but it's annoying for web development. For now, I've actually turned off caching.
• It's not 100% compatible with all of the sites out there. Using it reminds me of using Netscape a few years ago. It works great 99% of the time, but it crashes when I log into my Google AdSense account, and it "Could not connect to remote server" when I tried to log into the JavaOne content builder site.

  What's funny is that since I'm not used to having these problems (except on the Microsoft site, of course), it took me a minute to realize that the problem was Opera. So, to make sure everything is kosher, I use Firefox as my reference browser (back in the day, I used to use IE as my reference browser).

These issues aren't enough to make me switch back to Firefox, though. I like to have control of my computer's resources.

Firefox Interrupted

Like many Java developers (and an increasing number of web users in general), I have been a big Firefox supporter ever since I switched from Mozilla quite some time ago. The development plugins make it great for building web applications, tab browsing is cool, and it's a snappy little browser.

Or at least it used to be snappy. Lately, especially with version 1.5, it seems to gobble up tons of RAM and CPU. And since I use a laptop and Windows XP, I'm always conscious of how much of my 1GB of RAM is in use (not to mention the CPU). In short, Firefox has been getting on my nerves.

I was discussing this issue with my wife (who is also a developer that has become somewhat frustrated with Firefox), and she said some people were using Opera instead. I've always downloaded Opera just to see how some of my applications look, but I've never tried seriously using it -- that is, until now.

The latest release version (8.5) has full support for tabbed browsing and all of the hip standards (such as the XMLHttpRequest object), as well as integrated voice support and several other goodies. What about skins, plugins, and the large community around Firefox? Well, Opera has skins, and the next version will have widgets, which are equivalent to Firefox plugins.

But, more importantly, it doesn't eat up a ton of RAM or CPU. I can happily have dozens of tabs open and still fire up the latest version JBuilder or Eclipse and several other tools, which is a Good Thing.

So, am I switching from Firefox permanently? No. I think Firefox has a lot going for it, and I think the Mozilla foundation will address its current issues. Also, XUL is extremely powerful (not to mention compatible with JSF), and Opera doesn't appear to have an equivalent (please correct me if I'm wrong). So, I look at this as a break from Firefox, and a chance to try something different. And I'm enjoying it, too :-).

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