Borland Unveils 'Unified Development Environment' for Java

As part of its 20th anniversary celebration, Borland announced Enterprise Studio 7 for Java, an application lifecycle management system designed to help unify development teams and speed creation of business applications.

The company's new software brings together three products into one unified environment with modules for designing, developing and testing code in a single system. In addition to the three main functions of the new system, Enterprise Studio 7 offers a combination of features designed to help increase productivity by bringing together the people and processes involved with application development.

"Borland has taken a leadership position in establishing the integrated development environment; now, with our application lifecycle management strategy, we are unifying the development process for organizations and are a leading force behind the unified development environment," said Dale Fuller, CEO of Borland.

Software development today spans multiple disciplines, said Fuller. Developers are being asked to participate in more phases of the process.

Single Point of Control

"Today's projects are typically much more complex, and developers need tools that manage and reduce complexity as well as helping them perform or span multiple roles," said Rikki Kirzner, research director at IDC. "Unified development environments allow developers to work across organizational boundaries within a single interface, making developers much more productive while helping to reduce development time and costs."

Enterprise Studio 7 for Java is a single system that includes integrated technology from multiple Borland products. It bundles together the company's Caliber enterprise requirements management features, StarTeam configuration management features, Borland Enterprise Server and JDataStore software.

The company's Together tools -- which also are integrated into the package -- are designed to keep application models and source code synchronized throughout the development process through what the company calls "live source" technology.

Features in Together include unified modeling language (UML) support, database modeling, the ability to compare models visually, support for quality improvement with new design patterns, and new layout capabilities and diagram navigation.

Performance Management Technology

The new software also features quality analysis and performance management technology through the Borland Optimizeit Suite, which is designed to reduce performance problems in production and improve application quality.

New features offered by Optimizeit Suite for Enterprise Studio 7 include integrated J2EE performance management to address performance issues early in the development cycle and an automatic application quality analyzer to catch hidden issues that can cause problems in deployment.

The single user interface for Enterprise Studio 7 will be delivered through the newly launched Borland JBuilder X, which offers several interface improvements, including a standards-based Struts designer for rapid development of advanced Web applications using the familiar drag-and-drop approach.

A new deployment descriptor editor also is included with the new package and is designed to simplify configuring and modifying J2EE deployment descriptors for the application servers, including the JBoss application server.

Borland Enterprise Studio 7 for Java will begin shipping on Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms in December.

Tools for C++

Borland also recently announced two updated tools for C++ developers: C++BuilderX and Enterprise Studio for C++. While newer languages, such as Java, Jini, Perl and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) C#, receive much more attention in the press than C++, the C++ group of programmers is still, by most analyst estimates, the largest group of developers by far.

Development tool vendors like Borland, Rational (recently purchased by IBM), Metrowerks (operating now as a division of Motorola) and Sun continue to release tools for this community.

"C++BuilderX is the result of over two years of a renewed research and development effort focused on delivering new advanced development capabilities for the entire C++ market," J.P. LeBlanc, vice president and general manager of the mobile and C++ solutions group at Borland, said in a statement.

"We are focused on standards-based C++ application lifecycle management, as well as multiplatform and multicompiler support as important priorities."

C++ Development

As one of the largest development tool vendors, Borland has championed C and C++ development for more than 15 years. The C++Builder environment itself was first launched in 1991. The new C++BuilderX brings Unix support to the tool and also offers CORBA integration. (CORBA -- or the Common Object Request Broker Architecture -- is an Object Management Group specification that provides a standard interface between OMG-compliant objects.)

With the new tools, Borland hopes to offer a standards-based, cross-platform approach to programming in C++ with a development environment based on the same enterprise framework used by Borland JBuilder.

In JBuilder, an XML project format helps minimize the complexities of managing multiple compilers and debuggers through a single user interface. Coupled with debugging capabilities, this format is designed to shorten the porting time of applications to new platforms.

Reducing Complexity

Borland hopes C++BuilderX also will help ease the complexities associated with developing for multiple platforms by letting developers visually build and deliver cross-platform applications that do not require compiler extensions.

C++BuilderX also offers support for mobile and embedded computing environments, continued integration with Borland C++ compilers, and support for other standards-based C++ compilers, including GCC, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Metrowerks, Microsoft Visual C++ and Sun Forte C++.

"The C++BuilderX IDE notably incorporates Intel C++ compilers, Intel Performance Libraries and Intel VTune Performance Analyzers for Windows and Linux, supporting the Intel Pentium, Itanium, and Intel XScale families of processors," said Jonathan Khazam, general manager of the Intel software products division.