Eclipse.org eclipsing Borland's Jbuilder

ACCORDING TO information released this week by research firm Evans Data Corp, and collected as part of an April 2004 development survey, the Eclipse open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is closing in fast on Borland's Jbuilder, which is still the most popular Java IDE in Europe.

Analyst Albion Butters, said: "Eclipse looks like it may become a true open source killer app. We saw similar acceptance characteristics for MySQL in our Database Development Survey four months ago". The survey also found Eclipse the most popular Java IDE in North America, while usage of the tool -as the primary Java development environment- grew by 90% in North America, by 70% in Asia, and by 60% in Europe, the company claims.

While not open source, Borland offers a lightweight edition of Jbuilder, called "JBuilder Foundation", for free download here.

In related news, Netbeans, the Java IDE made open source by Sun Microsystems, recently hit version 3.6 and was reviewed by eWeek.com. The folks apparently fell in love with it. It can be downloaded from the Netbeans.org web site, and Sun is also offering it bundled with the latest Java virtual machine and SDK.

We'll be watching and reporting on this interesting horse race as it unfolds. µ

L'INQ
Evans Data Corporation
Netbeans.org (Open Source)
Borland Jbuilder X (Foundation Edition - Freeware)
Eclipse.org (Open Source)