Just so I understand the above. Is Alex saying that a more desirable
alternative to JB7 is to use a different Jave IDE along with ANT? So all
the time spent over the last two days working with Bob to get JB7 working
was... a waste of time?! <gulp> Oh well, as my favorite prof in grad
school used to say, "All experiences are bad, some seem good in
retrospect."
No, I'm just saying there are choices, that depending on your pain threshold
and determination, you can choose.
- JB4-7 Pro or Ent don't seem to have a problem building the packages, so
the current project files pretty much work fine. So if you have access to
one of these all is well
- JB7 Ent (and probably Pro, but probably not with Personal) supports
building with ANT. If after these efforts, it turned out that we should move
from the JBuilder Project based build to an ANT based build, then JB7 knows
how to handle ANT projects and does the right thing, so all is still well
for those who like JBuilder.
- For those who want an IDE and don't like the convoluted way you have to do
things with JB Personal then there is another IDE called Eclipse, that IBM
developed and made open source to seed a new extensible IDE in the market to
hopefully allow tool developers to all support a common platform. The
eclipse code base is what IBM release their commercial WSAD IDE. I
understand the free version that is available on the eclipse site is a full
Java IDE that is fully functional. It just doesn't have all the IBM
application server capabilities etc. I think it also supports ANT projects
which is why I mention it as an alternative.
- For those who don't want to learn yet another IDE and just want to make a
few mods and build then they can just get a JDK and the ANT package, which
once installed can build the entire package from the command line. Some may
simply prefer this to having to learn a new IDE and everything that goes
with that. (as you know)
Personally I like the current JBuilder mechanism as I know how it works and
it works for me with my setup. Obviously your mileage may vary....
Cheers
Alex
