“On December 8, Inprise (née Borland) announced that
JBuilder 3 Foundation, its new Java 2 development environment,
would be available for free (as in beer) for Linux. Actually,
it’s also available for Solaris and Windows at the same low price.
That’s right, Inprise made it free for the downloading….”
“First, the bad news. It’s big. JBuilder 3 Foundation alone is
about a 15 MB download. You also need the Java 2 SDK, which adds
roughly 21 MB. You may also want or need the JBuilder 3
documentation package, which contains the tutorials. It weighs in
at 25 MB. I have an ISDN line, and I still spent more than six
hours FTPing all the parts I needed….”
“Now for the good news. It’s pretty, it’s professionally done,
and it seems to my Java-naive self to be easy to work with, albeit
slow on my underconfigured desktop.”