GK: JBuilder 2008 continues to drive innovation and deliver value to Java developers by providing an enterprise-class IDE based on the Eclipse framework with heterogeneous Java EE 5 application server support.

We are focused on many attributes to accelerate enterprise implementations of the IDE with key features supporting collaborative team development, code archeology, visual EJB development, and code profiling and performance tuning tools.  

In addition to the new visual designer to create Swing-based UI's, JBuilder 2008 introduces Application Factories, which takes code reuse and productivity to a new level.  This innovative feature allows developers to focus more on the nature and purpose of the application, and less on the underlying platform, framework, and technologies.

CIOL: How do see the growth of Indian developer community in terms of talent and productivity?

GK: Embarcadero has a long and successful history with the Indian development community having engaged in joint projects for nearly a decade. We're serious about the region and are in the process of establishing a local office in Bangalore's epi-center as well.

What we've witnessed over the years has been dramatic in terms of the increase in talent and project success/quality rates. Our feeling is that a lot of this is due to the maturity of project management and better collaborative methods which did not exist a decade ago. When you combine the collaborative technologies now available which also include more sophisticated code quality metrics with agile SDLC approaches, daily project visibility allow nearly instantaneous course corrections to ensure what is required is what is being built. This solves customer satisfaction issues, ensures competitiveness and ultimately an insurance of time to market requirements.

CIOL: Can you throw some light on DB optimizer challenge 'Db Fest'?

GK: I'm glad you asked! We believe in our products ability to literally be downloaded, tried and value seen within an hour of installation that we instituted a challenge! We have basically set up a program where an end user can visit our 'challenge headquarters' at http://www.embarcadero.com/challenge/, select a problem to solve (profiling a database, build a visual query, etc) and guarantee the user will be successful in that first hour solving that problem.

Our whole business model is predicated on this ease of use/immediate productivity philosophy, so we wanted to throw this challenge out to see if we are wrong! And the results thus far have been dramatic with customers suspect of the challenge raving about their successes. We sweat the details in product design so that all the little ways to make you faster are thought through and implemented. This is just a culmination of the philosophy.