CodeGear officials stressed the new IDE's open source accommodation and extra features.

"This is really the first version of JBuilder that really fully embraces open source," said Michael Swindell, senior director of product management for CodeGear. Developers can use Eclipse plug-ins with JBuilder 2007, he said.

Featured in JBuilder are UML 2-based (Unified Modeling Language) visualizations of Java projects, via the product's LiveSource functionality. "[Developers] can graphically see how things work," McGlynn said.

A Visual EJB capability enables developers to drag and drop widgets onto a canvas and build Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), which interface to databases and services. EJB's have a notorious reputation for being difficult to implement and anything that helps with this is good, Rotibi said.

OptimizeIt Java code profiling also is highlighted in JBuilder 2007. "It lets the developer change source code to really make the application run faster and use less resources," McGlynn said.