JBuilder Personal 6.0

JBuilder Personal is a free graphical development environment for Java from Borland. It runs on Windows, MacOS X 10.1, and UNIX. It provides:

What You Need To Run JBuilder

You will need a PC running Windows or a Mac running OS X to run JBuilder. It is somewhat of a memory hog, so we recommend at least 128MB of RAM (256 is better) and a 300MHz Pentium II or 350MHz G3 processor. JBuilder also runs on the UNIX machines in Sweet Hall, if you're clever.

Installing JBuilder

You can get JBuilder from Borland here. You will have to sign up for their silly community and fill out a quick survey form, but they will eventually allow you to download JBuilder for free. We recommend you download the program itself and the documentation (which includes a complete copy of the Java API docs).

Getting Started

Creating a New Project

To create a new project, select File|New Project. Pick the directory you want to store the project folder in (e.g. C:\My Documents\CS108), and then name the project (e.g. HW2Tetris). JBuilder will create a directory for the project in the location you specified.

Adding Files

Create a src directory under your project directory. (If your project is in C:\My Documents\CS108\HW2Tetris, this directory would be C:\My Documents\CS108\HW2Tetris\src) Copy your project starter files, if any, to this new directory. Within JBuilder, select Project|Add Files... and add the starter files to the project.

Editing

The JBuilder editor is really slick. A couple nifty features:

Statement Completion (CodeInsight)

The editor is somewhat intelligent about what you're doing. Say you can't remember the arguments to System.arrayCopy. Just type System.arrayCopy( and wait for a second...the types and names of all the arguments will pop up. This works not just for arguments, but also for method names, and it works in both the Java libraries and your own code. Note, though, that if there's some compile error on some line before the current one, CodeSense won't work.

Revision Control

The editor keeps a bunch of backups of your work, so you can look back at old versions and even just swap files out wholesale if you've made some changes that didn't work out. WARNING: There are a limited number of backups, so this feature does NOT replace a version-control system like RCS or CVS.

Jumping Around

At the left you'll see a pane with the names of the classes defined in the current file, and all of their members and methods. You can quickly skip to the source code for a given method just by clicking on it in this pane.

Preparing to Run

Go Project|Project Properties... On the Run tab, choose the class whose main() method you want to run. On the Paths tab, set the Working Directory to be the directory containing any data files your program needs (this will probably be the src directory since that's where you put your starter files).

Running & Debugging

To run the program, select Run|Run. If you need to use the debugger (set breakpoints, step through, etc.), use Run|Debug instead. To set a breakpoint, just click in the margin to the left of the line where you want the breakpoint. Once you're debugging, there will be tabs at the bottom of the screen where you can look at all the local variables for all of the functions on the call stack, set watches, enable/disable breakpoints, etc.

Submitting

You can copy your entire project directory to UNIX using Fetch on Macs or WS_FTP on PCs. Once there, just go to the src directory and you can run all the UNIX commands you need to test and submit your code (rmclass, javac *.java, etc.). Please submit from the src directory; we don't need all the extra project files.

Using JBuilder on UNIX

Because it is written in Java, JBuilder can also run on UNIX. However, because it uses some fancy features, it doesn't play nice with AFS on most of the machines in Sweet Hall. (It takes about five minutes to bring up a file-open dialog.) We'll describe a workaround, though, in case you want to bring your JBuilder projects to office hours:
  1. Log in to one of the upstairs Sweet Hall machines.
  2. Type "ssh firebird". When prompted, enter your password. This will remotely log you in to one of the machines downstairs. The firebirds are PCs running Linux. Their AFS installation is limited, so JBuilder plays nice with them.
  3. If you haven't run JBuilder6 on UNIX before, do the following:
    1. Add the directory /usr/class/cs108/bin/jbuilder6/linux/bin to your path. (See Our Java On Unix Page for details on how to do this.)
    2. Open the file /usr/class/cs108/bin/jbuilder6/license.txt in xemacs
    3. Run jbuilder by typing "jbuilder" When asked for a serial number or license key, choose license key, and copy/paste the key from the license.txt file.
  4. To run JBuilder, type "jbuilder"
  5. Find and open your project file (it will have a .jpx extension) and then use JBuilder just like you would at home!
  6. Remember, you're actually running JBuilder remotely on a Linux PC, so you'll still need to run your project on the command line on a Solaris machine before submitting.

JBuilder 3

We used to have an installation of JBuilder Foundation 3.0 on the Solaris machines. We will likely be removing this installation in the near future. We recommend that you use JBuilder 6 with the above workaround if you want to develop on UNIX.
Last modified: Thu Feb 28 00:38:17 PST 2002