This flaw, small as it is, reflects a frequent experience I had with RAD 7 — many features are not implemented well. For example, installing the software was very difficult. After considerable support from IBM, I got the product installed correctly, although the original problems were never identified.

There’s more. An option to spell-check comments and literals (a useful capability) does not work because IBM ships no dictionary; if the feature is enabled, it marks all words as misspelled. The code-checking tools occasionally prescribe invalid corrections. Dynamic help in dialogs frequently takes you to the wrong level of help, so you’re forced to navigate back to your specific context.

Over time, the accumulation of these problems makes this otherwise good product frustrating to use.

I have one other complaint: IBM is far behind the other vendors in supporting existing Java standards. It is the only IDE in this review that has no support for either Java EE 5 or Java SE 6.

I’d recommend RAD 7 to sites already heavily committed to IBM, due to the product’s special support for those products, especially DB2 and WebSphere. Also, sites that want the same IDE for developers in many countries should like RAD 7, as it is implemented in far more foreign languages than any other IDE. However, the comparatively high price and my other complaints should encourage sites to examine all options before committing their dollars.

Borland/CodeGear JBuilder 2007 Enterprise Edition
JBuilder 2007 garnered first place in our last roundup. This edition is the first release since the product was ported to the Eclipse platform. It is shipped by CodeGear, a division of Borland that focuses on IDE tools.

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Due to Borland’s well-publicized difficulties and the fact that this is the first release on a new platform, I expected a good product with rough edges. Instead, I found a very smooth, very robust IDE with many innovative features. It’s safe to say that CodeGear decided to throw everything it had at this release — and succeeded brilliantly.

For Java coding, JBuilder has three different sets of code auditors and analyzers: the open-source PMD, Findbugs, and Borland’s own code-inspection tool. These work well together (in fact, they run the risk of overflowing the developer with flagged items), although they lack actionable explanations of the problem as well as the thoughtful resolution recommendations found in IBM’s RAD 7 product.

JBuilder bundles a metrics package that is more extensive than any I’ve seen in any IDE. It generates more than 80 different metrics, displaying them diagrammatically or in spreadsheet format. (Curiously, the metrics do not include the maintainability index, although all the metrics that make up this index are computed.) You can turn off the metrics you’re not interested in and set thresholds for those you do want to track. JBuilder also saves metrics snapshots so that you can compare the current state of the codebase with previous runs to make sure the numbers are trending in the right direction.