At my day job I've been learning Java. For my training I installed Eclipse, the free Java IDE, and Java development was easy. A simple install, lots of easy instruction via the web and books. Things worked. In fact, one of the cool things about Java was that some otherwise tedious tasks like parsing XML are pretty easy in java. When I wanted to try web development with java I installed Tomcat, a free and powerful web application server. Getting Eclipse to play nice with Tomcat was a bit more of a challenge, but one I eventually solved with a little google-fu.

Boss-man wants me to start ramping up to production work, which means that I have to start using JBuilder. We are using the 2005 edition of JBuilder. For those of you unfamiliar with Borland's products (now the CodeGear division of Embarcadero), 2005 was the year when they failed to produce a finished product. All 2005 editions were unstable and flaky. JBuilder 2005 is winning a special place in my heart though, right next to Chevy Citation that I had in college. It was a piece of shit too.

For those of you who write software, take note. I haven't actually used this software yet, and already I'd happily take the assault charge for the chance to punch one of the developers in the face. Installation took me six hours. Five of those hours were spent trying to figure out why all it would do when I was installing it under Windows Vista was stall at the first installation step. It never would install on my hard drive, but I was able to get it to install to a Virtual PC image running Windows 2000. That took half an hour. The final half hour was spent trying to register the software. That is a fun challenge, because even armed with a serial number and registration key, the software can't phone home to Borland servers.

The registration process was the final straw. To register you need to do the following steps:

1. Enter serial number and registration key
2. Choose registration method (I choose online)
3. Enter Borland account username and password (which I have)
4. Enter proxy settings
5. Wait through registration process

Since the registration servers are probably ancient history, the registration never succeeds. The instructions then become reminiscent of "lather, rinse, repeat."

There was a bit of irony in the whole thing though. The splash screen for JBuilder has the slogan "Excellence Endures." It's worth noting that the software development division of Borland is no more, spun off into CodeGear. And when CodeGear was purchased and became Embarcadero Technologies, the JBuilder code was scrapped. The 2008 version of JBuilder is nothing more than a set of plugins for Eclipse. Which is maddening since that's where I started from.