Software development vendor Borland has fully integrated its modeling software suite on top of Eclipse with Together and will release a version of the software in late August, officials announced Monday.
The announcement of Together 2006 for Eclipse, made at the start of the JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week, marks the first time individual components in the Together line — Architect, Designer and Developer — will be used on top of the Eclipse framework.
Together is the modeling, or visual design, backbone behind Borland’s software delivery optimization (SDO) initiative. It breaks down modeling requirements into three roles: architects, for overall project management; designers who create the UML-based
To date, Borland has sold a blended product for Eclipse users, Together Edition for Eclipse, incorporating all three developer roles. The company also sells versions of its Together line for its JBuilder IDE and Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET
Marc Brown, Borland director of product marketing, said two de facto frameworks have emerged in the development world and a full version based on Eclipse was made in light of developer needs.
“What we’ve really done, from a strategic point of view, is we looked at how to help out our customers from a pure modeling perspective and thought there were two strategic platforms to move to,” he said. “We need to be on Eclipse and we need to be on the Microsoft side.”
Together 2006 for Eclipse is based on Eclipse 3.1, which will support the many features found in Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE 5.0), expected to be released in a final version at the JavaOne conference. Currently the software is available as a release candidate on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and several flavors of Unix.
Borland has been gravitating its efforts to the Java-based Eclipse framework in recent times. Earlier this year, the company re-joined the open source organization as a director and said they would start a sub-project based on its Together technology.
Last month, the company announced it would base its JBuilder IDE
According to Jim Barillo, a Borland spokesman, the emphasis on Eclipse doesn’t spell the end for the JBuilder IDE. The company will just leverage Eclipse’s integration framework, allowing JBuilder to work seamlessly with Together for Eclipse.
New features have also been added to the Together suite for this release:
- support for business process modeling notation (BPMN), a graphical notation standard for depicting the end-to-end flow of a business process;
- support for the query/view/transformation (QVT) specification, used for model-to-model transformations in a model driven architecture (MDA). The MDA is a vendor-neutral specification for separating business and application logic so developers can model an application without worrying about the platform (.NET, J2EE, Web services) it will run on;
- model audits and metrics to measure quality.