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	Mr.Haki's JBuilder 4 Overview
See Also:	JBuilder Papers

Installing JBuilder 4 is easy. With previous version we needed to manually start different setup executables for the foundation part, samples, documentation and more. But now we can simply start a single setup, which will start the separate setup executables:

JBuilder installation

The setup is straight forward and we only have to indicate the folder, where we want JBuilder 4 to be installed. Once the setup is finished we can start JBuilder for the first time. We must enter the licensing information and we are ready to go:

JBuilder 4 Professional splash screen

The first new thing we notice is the tip of the day dialog window:

Tip of the day dialog window

Of course we can disable this feature and always activate it again later. The Help menu also contains an option to see the tips at any given time.

The Tools menu has undergone some major changes:

Tools menu on the main menubar

A lot of the features, like libraries and JDK settings, are now in the Tools menu. The way we work with libraries and different JDK versions has changed somewhat. In previous versions of JBuilder the library settings were saved in the JBuilder folder. But now we can differentiate between folders where library settings are stored. We can save a library in the user's home folder, the JBuilder folder (as before) and in the project folder. Because we can now save it in the project folder it is easier to check the library in to a version control system and to exchange the libraries with multiple developers. The Enterprise edition allows to create a user-defined folder to store the library files. The file format is now XML. The same goes for the JDK settings.

We can also see the Package Migration... option on the Tools menu. Yes, the wizard is back. Using this wizard we can migrate package names from old names to new names for a complete source tree. We can define our own naming conversion, but JBuilder already contains some most used naming conversions.

The File Open dialog window has undergone some changes:

New File Open dialog

We can add our own root folders using the OpenTools API. We can drill into Jar and Zip files directly and look at the contents. This feature of drilling into Jar and Zip files is also available in the structure pane of the AppBrowser.

The editor contains some nice new features, we will see in later articles. But one is worth mentioning right now: The key combination Ctrl+/ functions as a line comment toggle. Pressing this key combination adds the comment tag (//) to the beginning of the line or deletes it when it is already there.

The accompanying CD contains a set of tools. Some of them are just for evaluation, but also full versions of the products are there, like JReport. Also a JavaDoc OpenTool and mouse wheel support for Windows are available on the CD.

In the next couple of weeks we will write articles about new features and components in the latest JBuilder version. For example the InternetBeans components, Enterprise JavaBeans support, Team Development and the new Archive Builder Wizard.

InternetBeans components on the Component Palette