Borland also announced that a demonstration version of JBuilder will be distributed to all attendees at the conference, and be publicly available next week on its company website at http://www.inprise.com/jbuilder/.

"JBuilder represents an exciting new evolutionary step for Borland," said Del Yocam, Borland's president and CEO. "As the leader in providing high-performance, high-productivity visual development tools for Windows and client/server computing, we are bringing this experience to the platform-independent world of Java and the new generation of corporate 'Information Network' applications. We invite all software developers to take a look at what an industrial-strength Java development environment should be: Borland JBuilder."

"Our mainstream clients have primarily been exploring the creation of client-side Java applications this year," said Melinda Ballou, senior research analyst at Meta Group. "We expect that usage to expand to more complex, server-side Java applications over the next 18 to 24 months as the language solidifies and as a result of the performance benefits offered by evolving JIT compilers and IDEs -- such as Borland JBuilder and those from other vendors."

Borland JBuilder is a family of highly-productive, visual development tools for creating high-performance, platform-independent applications using the Java programming language created by Sun Microsystems. JBuilder's scalable, component-based environment is designed for all levels of "Information Network" development projects ranging from applets and applications that require networked database connectivity to client/server and enterprise-wide, distributed multi-tier computing solutions. As part of Borland's Golden Gate strategy to support major industry standards in all of its tools, JBuilder's open environment will support 100% Pure Java, JavaBeans™, JDK™ 1.1, JFC, AFC, RMI, CORBA, JDBC, ODBC, and all major corporate database servers. JBuilder will also provide developers with a flexible open architecture to incorporate third-party tools, add-ins, and JavaBean components.

"We needed a professional development tool to build our corporate Java applications," said Patrick Ryan, design engineer at Hobart Corporation, the world's leading supplier of food equipment and service to the foodservice and food retail industries. "Our requirements were simple: 100% Java code, complete JDBC and JavaBeans support, and a professional IDE. Unlike other Java tools, JBuilder's true Two-Way-Tools generate pure Java code, with no hidden tags or macros. We have evaluated most of the tools available on the market, and only JBuilder met our strict criteria. Unlike Visual J++ and Symantec Cafe, which lock you into one middle-tier architecture which we didn't care for, the code generated by Borland's JBuilder is 100% Pure Java."

Based on JDK 1.1
Borland JBuilder is one of the first Java development environments with complete support for JavaSoft's JDK 1.1, JDBC and the JavaBeans component model. This support will give JBuilder developers a real advantage -- especially in the areas of database connectivity and component creation.

"Borland's experience with object-oriented development environments has contributed to the development of the JavaBeans component model," said Jon Kannegaard, vice president of software products at JavaSoft, a business unit of Sun Microsystems Inc. "With Borland's help, we have been able to greatly extend the flexibility and robustness of the Java language. We recognize the importance of high-quality, component-based RAD tools like JBuilder to the continued success of Java."

BeansExpress
To increase developer productivity by encouraging component reuse, JBuilder will feature BeansExpress, the fastest and easiest way to build JDK 1.1-compliant JavaBean components. With BeansExpress, developers can visually create components from scratch, or combine a number of existing components into a new JavaBean. BeansExpress will also allow developers to easily deploy their JavaBeans and add them to JBuilder's easy-to-navigate component palette.

Each version of JBuilder will include a set of award-winning JavaBeans from KL Group and JavaSoft's standard AWT components. JBuilder Professional and Client/Server Suite will also ship with over 100 reusable JavaBeans for GUI design, Internet development and database access, including Grid, Tree, Navigator, Image, Checkbox, Choice, Picklist, Field, List, Locator, ButtonBar, StatusBar and many more. Source code for these components will be included.

"We have selected Borland JBuilder to develop our commercial JavaBean components: Objective Blend and Objective Grid for Java," said Bill Loeb, chief Java architect at Stingray Software. "JBuilder offers the fastest way to create and deploy JavaBean components with Java BeansExpress. JBuilder's component architecture and its full support for the JavaBean standard make it the preferred development tool for professional JavaBeans development."

DataExpress Scalable Database Architecture
JBuilder will include a new, scalable database architecture called DataExpress, which provides the most robust, pure JDBC database connectivity of any Java development environment. With DataExpress, developers will be able to use JBuilder's flexible drag-and-drop data-aware components and visual design tools to build sophisticated database applications and applets using industry-standard JDBC database connectivity.

A technical whitepaper discussing JBuilder's advanced DataExpress architecture will be available next week on Borland Online at http://www.inprise.com/jbuilder/.

"Since it gives us the ability to leverage our Delphi experience and to move to the latest version of Sun's JDK, we chose Borland's JBuilder over Microsoft's Visual J++," said John Melka, vice president and senior systems engineer of Nations Bank Services, Inc., Global Finance Technology Support for Nations Bank. "Because JBuilder uses the JDBC-compliant DataExpress architecture, we can easily utilize a variety of data sources -- not just row/column databases -- thus improving performance and enhancing our scalability."

Proven Visual Development Tools
JBuilder will include many developer productivity features based on Borland's proven experience delivering industrial-strength visual development environments and programming languages. These capabilities include:

• The Borland RAD WorkBench -- a professional-level IDE common to Borland's entire family of visual development tools, with a tightly-integrated application browser, project manager, code editor, HTML viewer, graphical debugger, and lightening-fast compiler
• Pure Java Two-Way-Tools -- the Pure Java source code editor and visual designers are always synchronized, with no hidden macros or tags. This gives JBuilder developers complete control over their code and applications at all times
• Productivity Wizards -- to simplify development and deployment of projects, applications, applets and JavaBeans
• New Application Browser -- combines the features of a project manager, class browser, file browser, and source code editor to make managing, navigating, and editing source code easier and more dynamic than any other RAD tool.
• Powerful graphical debugger and SmartChecker Compiler -- makes it easy to find and fix bugs in an application's code, then rebuild/recompile with the world's fastest incremental compiler technology.
• Local InterBase server and Borland SQL Tools for building, managing and deploying scalable database server applications.