Athena

JBuilder 3 Easter Egg

This page refers to JBuilder 3 Standard, Professional and Enterprise, not JBuilder 3 Foundation.

  1. Double-click anywhere on the splash screen, which displays whilst JBuilder is starting, when the mouse cursor turns from an hourglass back to a normal pointer.

    You will hear a nasty sounding thunderclap which is supposed to refer to the product's code name of Storm (the sound is stored in a custom Windows resource called STORMTHUNDER which is compiled into JBuilder.exe).

  2. Choose Help | About (Alt+H, A).

    Click the Version 3.00 phrase to hear the same thunder and lightning as mentioned above.

  3. Choose Help | About... (Alt+H, A).

    In this dialog, the area at the bottom is a dedication to Hanpeter van Vliet, the creator of Mocha and Crema and one of the true pioneers of Java development tools.

    Hold down the Ctrl key and click the text repeatedly and you will get a number of successive messages. However if you try and get the next message too quickly (you need to wait for about a minute or more between each one), it will say Patience, Grasshopper.

    An example list of the messages displayed is shown below.

    Watch this space...

    com...

    ...borland...

    ...Raven...

    ...Metro...

    ...JAyVA...

    ...Nemesis...

    ...Latte...

    ...visual...

    ...open...

    ...Spartacus...

    ...Inprise...

    ...Hermes...

    ...Storm...

    ...JBuilder...

    ...20576

    You got it. Go do it.

    When the number gets displayed at the end of the message list (bear in mind that it changes) you can finish with the About box by pressing OK.

    Now choose View | Command Line (or hold Ctrl and press -) to view the Command Line window at the bottom of the main JBuilder window. Type in the single words that are displayed, separated by periods. So with the example messages displayed above, you would type in:

    com.borland.Raven.Metro.JAyVA.Nemesis.Latte.visual.open.Spartacus.Inprise.Hermes.Storm.JBuilder.20576

    Entering the string in the Command Line window produces a window showing head shots of all the developers, QA people, translators etc. by department.

    Now move your mouse over each of the pictures, and it will be exchanged for a morphed version of the mug shot, with a brief textual description on the status bar at the bottom of the window. For example, this face:

    turns into this face:

    To avoid the lengthy process of generating and reading all the About box messages in order to identify the key number, programmers can pre-emptively work it out, using a small piece of source code. Click here to see the details.

  4. In the editor, the colour syntax highlighting emboldens more than just Java keywords. It also considers these (case-sensitive) words as reserved words: Jayson, Minard and JAyVA.

    Jayson was responsible for the Delphi side of JBuilder, in the days when it was written in both Delphi and Java (before JBuilder 3 Foundation). He was also responsible for the original three pane browser IDE. This environment was nicknamed Jayva as a mixture of Jayson and Java.


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