Borland classes in JBuilder 3 FE
Borland JBuilder 3 FE is a great IDE, but still: what about all those classes we have available in our paid JBuilder 3 version? I mean we have developed applications using these classes and now we can't even compile them in JBuilder 3 FE.

JBuilder 3 FE works with libraries for class, source and documentation paths, just like the regular JBuilder. So it seems like a good idea to create new libraries for the regular JBuilder 3 libraries. But before we start I can tell you it doesn't work. Including for example the jbcl3.0.jar file in a library makes the library disabled. And when the library is disabled we cannot include it in our projects. So what to do?

The answer is unpacking the JAR files to a folder and create a library which uses this folder. Let's illustrate this with an example:
Suppose we want to create a library for the jbcl3.0.jar file. This file contains most of the com.borland classes and once we can include it in JBuilder 3 FE, we can at least compile our Java applications.

• First we must unpack the jbcl3.0.jar file into a separate folder. In the JBuilder 3 folder we create a folder called libclasses.
• Copy the file jbcl3.0.jar from the JBuilder 3 lib folder to the new folder libclasses.
• Start a command prompt and go to the libclasses folder.
• Make sure your java\bin folder is in your path, because we must execute the jar executable.
• Type the following command:
    jar xvf jbcl3.0.jar
  The files in the JAR file are now extracted and put into the libclasses folder.

• Go to Project | Default project properties...
• Select the Paths tab page and the Required Libraries tab page.
• Select the Add... button. A dialog window is opened with a list of available libraries.
• Select the New... button, because we want to create a new library. The following dialog is shown:
  
  
  
  
  
• Fill in at the Name: field something like Regular JBuilder 3 JBCL 3.0.
• Select the Add... button on the Class page.
• A dialog window is opened for browsing the correct folder:
  
  
  
  
  
• Browse to the libclasses folder and select it.
• We can now close the dialog window.

The library can be added to projects and we can compile our existing applications with the com.borland packages. We can experiment with adding sources and documentation to the library.

It is still not possible to add components from the com.borland packages to the component palette. If we try to do this the components will be disabled and cannot be used in the Visual Designer.