Ancient History: JBuilder Open Tools

Some years ago, the Java IDE marketplace looked quite different than it does today. VisualAge was very popular. Borland’s JBuilder was another top contender. Since then, many of the good ideas from VisualAge ended up in Eclipse, while the JBuilder of that era was replaced by a newer, Eclipse-based JBuilder. Not everything ended up on Eclipse, though: NetBeans matured to a slick IDE (with its own plugin ecosystem), as did IDEA.

But this post isn’t about today, it’s about a leftover bit of history. Back in that era, I had a section of this web site dedicated to the numerous JBuilder “Open Tools” (plugins) then available. That content is long obsolete and I removed it years ago. Remarkably, this site still gets hits every day from people (or perhaps bots) looking for it.

I agree strongly that Cool URIs don’t change, but that’s OK, because my old JBuilder Open Tools content just wasn’t very cool anyway.

On the off chance you landed on this page looking for it, here is a Google link for your convenience, or you can take a look at web.archive.org’s snapshot of my old list.