Borland is getting out of its IDE products

It’s clear now. Borland, the company behind a whole range of development environments, probably best known for Delphi and JBuilder, has decided to divest its entire line of IDE products. Borland wants to focus on application lifecycle management. See the Letter from Borland CEO Tod Nielsen.

This more than likely brings the JBuilder era to a close too. How long could it have lasted anyway, caught between the commercial IntelliJ and the open-source duo of Eclipse and NetBeans? It had been evident for some time that JBuilder couldn’t fully compete with those products. It had even been announced that future JBuilder releases would be built directly on Eclipse.

For the Java IDE scene, JBuilder’s clinical death isn’t a major loss. There are far better alternatives, commercial and open source alike. The blow will be felt much more keenly by companies whose development is based on Delphi. In the longer term, those companies will probably have to make a crucial decision about whether to move to .NET or Java.

May Borland’s IDEs rest in peace … amen.

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• Borland to sell its IDE Business
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