Borland has announced their technical roadmap for JBuilder. Later this year Borland will ship JBuilder 2006 which will add shared code and shared debugging features. In the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named "Peloton", which will be completely Eclipse-based and add better dependency analysis features.

The shared code and debugging will allow developers in different locations to participate in shared coding and debugging, as though they were sitting down together in the same room.

The Eclipse news follows up from their February announcement of joining the Eclipse board and their intention to re-build their entire application life cycle management product suite on top of Eclipse. Borland sees Eclipse as an integration framework upon which they will be building JBuilder as well as their other products. By leveraging Eclipse, they can realize the cost savings of not having to worry about maintaining IDE functionality, and integration with other Borland tools, as well as gaining a larger audiece via Eclipse and benefitting from the large ecosystem of Eclipse tools.

According to Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland, the major new addition planned for Peloton will be a dependency analysis feature. It will be able to understand the dependencies between different artifacts in the project, such as the link between JSP's and struts controllers, EJB's and the persistence tier, without the user needing to configure these explicitly or switch views. Debugging will be improved - stepping into different tiers will be easier without end users needing to manually set additional breakpoints.

Code-name Peloton comes from a cycling metaphor, which is used to describe a group of cyclists who can ride faster together than they could individually, reflecting Borland's emphasis on team collabortation features in JBuilder.

Borland has not announced any pricing information, but they are looking into offering a separate 'distribution' of JBuilder on Eclipse all integrated to make it easy for corporate clients to deploy.

Borland chose Eclipse over Netbeans after watching industry momentum and listening to customers who think Eclipse will be their next major platform.

When asked about what their differentiators for JBuilder-Eclipse over Websphere Studio will be, Borland responded that WS Studio is focused on Websphere, whereas JBuilder supports multiple application server platforms.

Luis De La Rosa in his 2005 predictions suggested that Eclipse will become the Java community's answer to Visual Studio.NET, as a de facto IDE; this being a good thing for the Java community, as Eclipse will help build a market/ecosystem for development tools much like Visual Basic, which is the real goal that Sun wants to reach: 10 million developers using Java.

Borland's decision to join IBM in basing their IDE on Eclipse is certainly bringing us closer to that prediction! What do you think?