Borland Software today announced the release of Borland Silk 2008, the
first major architecture revision to its automated testing tool in two years, adding new
functionality and language support.
The Silk line is part of Borland’s Lifecycle Quality Management” offerings, which are designed to cover quality assurance and testing
earlier in the application development process so problems can be caught
sooner in the development process.
For Borland (NASDAQ: BORL), which moved from Cupertino, Calif. to Austin,
Texas, last year, an overhaul of Silk has been a lengthy process, requiring
almost two years. That’s because it redesigned the structure of the
application to make it more open and customizable while retaining backward
compatibility.
“What customers have been asking us for is the ability to extend Silk, to
make it more flexible, to support apps we don’t support,” Brad Johnson,
Borland’s director of product marketing for Lifecycle Quality Management,
told InternetNews.com. “To do so meant either we abandon our old
customers with a new product or we took more time for a new architecture. We
chose a new architecture.”
Johnson said the company wanted to give customer the option of adding
languages or technologies either “we can’t support fast enough or stuff we
will never support. The open agent allows customers, partners and vendors to
write their own functional automation support.”
The move to Flex
Borland Silk 2008 consists of three parts. The first is SilkTest 2008,
the functional and regression-testing product designed to support Web 2.0
applications and built on Adobe Flex. With this version, Borland replaced
the custom object oriented language it used to develop automated tests in
favor of the Java.
The second part is SilkPerformer 2008, the enterprise-class load and
performance testing solution. This new version supports testing the
scalability of Web 2.0 applications in Flex and AJAX
Finally there is SilkCentral Test Manager 2008, which is designed to act
as the test management console, handling test assets, security, and
providing assistance to manual testers. It’s been upgraded to greater
scalability and performance over a distributed network.
Borland said it chose to emphasize Flex in this release because it’s the
best choice for RIA development in the enterprise. “The reason is you have a
vendor to go to who is in control of the spec and will answer the calls.
We’re not neglecting AJAX, but there are 200 flavors of it. We went deep and
complete with Flex, but we’re working with an existing customer base for AJAX
testing,” he said.
Thomas Lin, senior manager for QA automation at education software
developer BlackBoard, said he was most interested in the open architecture
of Silk 2008. “The whole concept of automation is to build an integrated,
automated framework,” he said. “We use many tools, both in-house developed
and open tools. So building an open platform that is easy to integrate and
extend is something that’s very desirable.”
Borland Silk 2008 is available now from Borland and authorized resellers.
