Spring 2008 Excelsior JET Customer Survey Is Over

The customer survey we have been running since the end of February is now over, and I want to share some results with you.

But, first of all, our congratulations and the $100 Amazon certificate go to our prize draw winner, and a big thank you goes to all the participants. The response rate was overwhelming: over 32% of sent invitations resulted in a filled survey. Thank you very much for your feedback, we appreciate it!

(The prize draw winner is a person from Brazil whose company has purchased Excelsior JET Professional Edition for Windows in mid-October 2007. We have not heard back from him yet, so I do not have permission to disclose the names. Notice to the winner: If you are reading this, please get in touch with us at earliest convenience, or we would have to choose again.)

Back to the survey, let me begin with the Java IDE usage profile. It turned out that over 65% of Excelsior JET customers use Eclipse, and about 25% use NetBeans, the latter being a bit surprising for us. Our favorite IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, occupies the third place with 8.7%, followed closely by JBuilder (7.7%). A few people use JCreator, while each of CodeGuide, EditPlus, Metrowerks Codewarrior, SlickEdit, Textpad, and XCode were mentioned only once, as well as Oracle JDeveloper and IBM WebSphere/Rational tools. One person uses MS Visual Studio 2005 as a Java IDE, which must be an interesting experience. Finally, 11.5% of all respondents indicated that they use no (Java) IDE at all. So do I - hello guys!

(For the sharp-eyed reader: yes, it was possible to specify more than one IDE, so the total exceeds 100% with about 1.37 Java IDEs per Excelsior JET user )

Every second respondent has expressed interest in sans-install distribution. It seems however that in most cases the Self-Contained Directory option, found on the page Backend in JetPackII, covers their needs.

Over half of all respondents use Ant to automate their builds, but most of them find calling jc and xpack from their Ant scripts good enough. Just about 5% of Ant users have expressed interest in tighter integration.

Now, the most interesting question that we used as the headliner: Excelsior JET for Mac OS X. First, it turned out that 60% of existing Excelsior JET users are not interested in us adding Mac OS X support. Then, only 12 people said they would pay for the Mac OS X version in advance. Unfortunately, even if all of them would agree to pay, say, the list price of Excelsior JET Pro for Windows in US Dollars, that would allow us to accumulate only $27,600. That is a nice sum on its own, but it won’t help us much, as our rough cost estimate for the Mac OS X port is in the low six-figure range.

Still, 40% of existing customers expressing interest in a new product is a good motivation to seek other sources of funding. Compare this to the 32-bit Solaris port: less than 11% of respondents have expressed interest, and nobody is willing to preorder it.

POLYQUARK’s Wrapstyler featured in the Excelsior JET Gallery

Today’s addition to the gallery of real-world applications optimized and packaged with Excelsior JET is POLYQUARK’s Wrapstyler, a simulation software for Automotive and Aircraft interiors trimming operations. If you are driving a Peugeot, Renault, or BMW, chances are good that the seats of your car were made with the help of Wrapstyler (and thus with our help.)

Jean-Yves Brud, POLYQUARK Manager, writes in:

Using an exclusive and industry-proven 3D to 3D flattening technology, Wrapstyler generates accurate 2D patterns from 3D shapes that can be transferred to nesting and cutting systems.

Deformation, stress and normal pressure calculation allow in-depth analysis and early detection of feasibility problems.
A real time integrated 3D rendering tool gives immediate realistic display of virtual prototypes.

The main benefits for our software are:

reduction of the number of physical prototypes

faster design

early anticipation of feasibility problems

better results

cost-saving

If you want us to add your Excelsior JET-compiled product to the Gallery, please contact us.

Excelsior JET 6.0 Maintenance Pack 1 is available

Excelsior JET 6.0 Maintenance Pack 1 is available for download. It is a highly recommended update that fixes multiple customer issues.

Birds are supposed to eat bugs, aren’t they?

It turns out that sometimes a bird can become a “bug” in an IT system.

The picture below was taken by the camera installed at one of the Russian Railways’ freight car wheel measurement systems, the software for which we help develop. Depot operators need the picture of the train passing through the system to check its serial number, but this little bird hinders them from their work!

The bird is brave enough to build its nest right inside the system unit, very close to the railways. It may be a good tradeoff for her, because it is warm in the box thanks to the camera heating equipment. Or maybe she likes to watch trains passing by, who knows?

Run Time Editor 3 Enters The Excelsior JET Gallery

RCS Programming Logo

A second addition to the Excelsior JET Application Gallery in two days. RCS Programming’s Run Time Editor is an IDE for control systems designers.

John Rule, the author, proudly writes:

The new Run Time Editor 3 is the next generation Rapid Application Design and prototyping environment that incorporates many of the best features from it predecessor, the Run Time Editor 2. The highly acclaimed RTE2 is still used for control systems integration, and as a general user interface design environment, but the RTE3 goes much further. Network communications are very intuitive, and the scripting is based on the widely used Java and JavaScript languages.

The scripting gives you access to native operating system functionality like file input/output (including dialogs), command line (shell) interface, network communications, audio and video capabilities, calling .dlls, etc. The example project included called the “DVD Librarian” provides an advanced example of creating your own user interface to manage your CD/DVD library, including integrated Home Theater control. There is also a full screen mode for hiding all of the operating system elements, providing a greater user experience.

Almost anything you can do in Java (or any other IDE for that matter) you can do with the RTE3!

A bold claim, is not it? Anyway, I downloaded the demo and on first sight it seems to be put together well. So maybe you should try it too.

If you want us to add your Excelsior JET-compiled product to the Gallery, please contact us.

Fixes/Workarounds for Java SE API Bugs: New Service for Excelsior JET Users

We have started offering a new consulting service to Excelsior JET customers: Java SE API bugfixing.

Exceptional expertise in the Java core and the commercial Java Technology license enable us to fix bugs found in the Sun’s JDK implementation and merge the fixes into a mainstream version of Excelsior JET.

What is more important is that we would start working on the fix or workaround for your particular problem immediately upon your request. A fix in the JDK may appear much later, if at all, especially if you have to stick to a legacy version of the Java technology for any reason.

Our support records also show that some of you may not move to the latest Java version due to bugs introduced in Java SE platform classes recently. If this is your case, we are ready to resolve such issues on a consultancy basis and ship an updated version of Excelsior JET to you.

Of course, Sun Microsystems fixes lots of bugs in each minor and major update of Java SE but many issues stay unresolved. For instance, a plenty of Swing/AWT bugs published at

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/

have been kept untouched for years.

To sum it up, if you need something fixed in the core Java API, versions from J2SE 1.4.2 onwards, just let us know and Excelsior engineers will be back to you with a proposal.

Don’t forget to check out the entire range of services available to Excelsior JET customers.

TuxGuitar Goes Native, Appears In Excelsior JET Gallery

TuxGuilar

TuxGuitar, an open source project aimed at creating a multitrack tablature editor and player in Java, has released version 1.0-rc1. TuxGuitar users may now choose between two native, JRE-independent downloads, one optimized and packaged using Excelsior JET and the other with GCJ, and the conventional bytecode package that requires a JRE to run.

TuxGuitar now appears in the Excelsior JET Application Gallery.

If you want us to add your product to the Gallery, please contact us.

Excelsior JET for Mac OS X and Other Interesting Questions

We are running a survey among Excelsior JET customers to measure the demand for a few particular features and improvements we have in mind. In particular, we want to know if there is serious interest in a Mac OS X port.

The survey will last until the end of March. All respondents enter a draw to win a $100 Amazon certificate.

If you are a paying customer and want to participate, but have not received an invitation, chances are that it has triggered a spam filter or your email address has changed (there were 20+ bounces.) Please email us and we’ll send you an invitation. Make sure to whitelist our domain, excelsior-usa.com.

Excelsior JET Flash Tutorial #1

The result of our first attempt to make a Flash tutorial for Excelsior JET is live:

Excelsior JET Getting Started Tutorial

We would greatly appreciate critique and suggestions. Please email us or leave a comment.

Protect Your Java Code - Through Obfuscators And Beyond

I have written a new article, this time on Java obfuscators.

Read “Protect Your Java Code - Through Obfuscators And Beyond”

Comments and improvement suggestions are welcome.

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