The Developer Tools Group of Borland Software have announced a three-year roadmap for JBuilder, its Java Integrated Development Environment. The roadmap includes an update to JBuilder 2006, a new underlying framework based on Eclipse in JBuilder 2007, codenamed Peloton and provides insight into the functionality being developed in future JBuilder versions. According to the company, future capabilities for the product line include new team collaboration and developer productivity features, support for new Java standards and emerging open source tools and frameworks, enhanced support for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and more.

The JBuilder roadmap is being presented at this week’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco and to customers and prospects throughout the world during Borland's 2006 Global Developer Road Show.

“Over the coming years, JBuilder will continue to provide the same innovative features and ease-of-use that users have come to expect from the JBuilder franchise, but will increasingly appeal to developers who want to leverage Eclipse plug-ins, open source tools and emerging development paradigms like SOA,” said Michael Swindell, senior director of product management for Borland's Developer Tools Group. “As we form the new developer-focused organization, we’re committed to moving JBuilder and our other IDE products into the future - continuing Borland’s tradition of simplifying complex development problems and helping customers build better software, faster.”

Borland’s Developer Tools Group claims to be working to deliver on this three-year roadmap with:

• A free JBuilder 2006 Foundation edition available for download.
• Two new JBuilder 2006 updates planned for release this year.
• The next major release of JBuilder codenamed "Peloton" expected to be available in Q4.

JBuilder 2006 has features such as shared code editor views and joint debugging capabilities. These features are intended to allow local and remote developers to jointly design, edit and debug applications in real time.

“Peloton” or JBuilder 2007, which is expected to be released in Q4 2006, will marry the number one commercial Java development environment with the extensible open source Eclipse framework. The company claims that JBuilder will offer the flexibility and cost-efficiencies of an open platform, while providing the enterprise-class functionality and productivity advances that make Eclipse and open source tools even more attractive to large enterprises. In addition to providing developers with simplified access to a rich community of Eclipse plug-ins, JBuilder Peloton also intends to provide enhanced support for visual EJB and Web Services design and development. It will support the same kind of team collaboration features available now in JBuilder 2006 and will be compatible with JBuilder 2006 projects.

The JBuilder roadmap also includes new Rapid Application Development (RAD) web development tooling. The center of gravity in web development is a complex mix of runtimes and frameworks, including powerful offerings from the Open Source community like Spring, Hibernate and Shale. New tooling capabilities within future versions of JBuilder should help developers address this complexity and better leverage the flexibility and value that Open Source Systems can provide.