Old Places, Old Faces
By Al Williams
Few company names hold as much appeal for hard-core programmers as Borland. But now, Borland -- the name -- is no more. Early in 1998, Borland changed its name to Inprise, but it's clear that the company is still Borland and a cadre of loyal programmers continues to tout the virtues of its development tools.
There was a time when Borland's fortunes rested on its Pascal product. Later, when C and C++ gained popularity, Borland had a well-respected offering there, as well. Eventually Microsoft (for reasons not germane to this discussion) pretty much took over the C++ market, leaving Borland with a throng of die-hard Pascal programmers. In an attempt to revitalize Pascal, Borland introduced Delphi -- an extremely visual environment that won critical acclaim for its technology. However, even after Borland put a new C++ back end on Delphi (creating CodeBuilder), too many programmers were entrenched in Microsoft C++ and wouldn't or couldn't switch horses in midstream.
But now many developers are switching horses anyway, moving to Java. Inprise (and others) see this as a crucial time to win mind-share among those programmers. Inprise's latest attempt to lure Java programmers centers around a Delphi-like tool called JBuilder. I recently worked with the latest version, JBuilder 2, and I'll tell you what I found in this month's column. (You can find a demo of JBuilder at www.inprise.com/download.html.) Along the way, I'll also show you how to format strings for output using the Java text-handling classes.
