CodeGear integrates JBuilder’s OptimizeIt suite of tools, which Borland offered for years as a separate product. OptimizeIt provides numerous high-resolution views into the performance and memory consumption of the software. It includes code coverage analysis (although only as a percentage of the class covered, rather than on a line-by-line basis) and other insights into what is happening beneath the covers, including per-thread data.

JBuilder also offers impressive collaborative features. It sports a developer-oriented messaging system, which helps with code reviews as well as developer communication. It uses a peer-to-peer design that, unfortunately, works only with peers on the same network segment.

For team coordination, JBuilder provides TeamInsight, which is an easily configurable portal server that comprises key open source tools: Subversion, Bugzilla, Continuum, and XPlanner. This portal is accessible through a Web interface or via JBuilder and includes numerous project reports and metrics. Neither of the other IDEs comes close to this level of team integration.

JBuilder feels solid throughout — a remarkable achievement given its status as a first release on Eclipse. The only bugs I ran into were frequent help icons that did not work. My complaints focus on features that are not implemented, such as the lack of visual designers for JSP or JSF (although these are coming shortly). The product also does not generate deployment files for applications using DB2, which is a curious omission. Finally, it currently ships on Windows only. Linux and Mac versions are slated for May.

At $1,999 for the edition I reviewed, JBuilder is not cheap, but it provides tremendous bang for the buck. For developers who don’t need all the high-end features, there are professional and developer versions of JBuilder available for $799 and $399, respectively.

Sun NetBeans 5.5
Sun’s NetBeans product is the only completely open source product in this review, available at no cost from netbeans.org. Unlike the other packages, NetBeans requires a little assembly; you start with the core NetBeans platform and add several “packs,” depending on your needs.

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Currently, Sun offers an Enterprise pack and a Visual Web pack (both used in this review), a mobility pack for J2ME programming, and a C/C++ pack. A profiler (also included in this review) is a separate pack. These packs are supersets of the common IDE plug-ins and generally provide substantial new functionality. Once I downloaded the packs, I installed them with no difficulty.

When I first examined NetBeans, several years ago, it was more of a tagalong IDE with some good features, rather than a true peer of the other Java IDE products. This is no longer the case, and NetBeans’ popularity reflects this: A December 2006 survey by BZ Research shows that NetBeans enjoyed robust growth last year and is now in second place behind only Eclipse (which maintains a comfortable lead).

For enterprise computing, NetBeans provides several useful features, including support for Java EE 5 in the form of Sun’s GlassFish project. The IDE has good tooling for services-based enterprise development, be it SOA or just plain Web services. For example, NetBeans is the only product reviewed here with full diagramming and modeling capabilities for BPEL.

The enterprise services offerings are offset, however, by lack of support for common products. NetBeans does not support IBM’s WebSphere app server, and it lacks integrated support for any database other than JavaDB. The latter point needs some clarification, though: NetBeans will recognize any JDBC-accessible database, but it generates deployment files and exploits DBMS-specific features only for JavaDB.