Borland CodeGear Tools

Borland integrates with Eclipse, and floats its tools division as CodeGear.

In a press release issued today, Borland has announced the formation of CodeGear, a wholly-owned subsidiary, which will contain Borland’s Developer Tools Group. CodeGear will be its own company with its own direction and will take on development of Borland’s C++, C#, Delphi, Interbase, and JBuilder tools. This move will include the eventual re-branding of these development tools.

In a nutshell, Borland has focused on becoming an application lifecycle company, while CodeGear will focus solely on developers and development tools. Besides the list of existing Borland products above, CodeGear plans to introduce a new family of rapid-application development (RAD) tools around PHP, Ruby, and Ajax.

JBuilder 2007

The next release of JBuilder will be a CodeGear re-branded offering that breaks from its past, and is now integrated with the open-source Eclipse IDE. Borland has not been blind to the shift to open-source servers, frameworks, and developer tools over the past few years. However, they also note that there is still a need for support and integration with these tools. CodeGear JBuilder 2007 aims to fill this need.

The next release of JBuilder will include tools to aid distributed software development teams. The need for these tools has grown with the use of offshore programmers, through acquisitions, work-from-home employees, and even within the office environment itself. These tools include:

- LiveSource – A two-way modeling tool that is UML v2-compliant. This tool supports full round-trip engineering (UML to code; back to UML; to code again; and so forth) without the use of code markers or special files in your project.

- EJB Workbench – A visualization tool for Java web service and EJB development. This tool supports full round-trip engineering, helps the developer transform seamlessly from EJB 2 to EJB 3, and supports annotations, deployment descriptors, and XDocLet.

- Project Assist and Team Insight – A suite of team communication, bug tracking, and project tracking tools for large-scale application development. The tools include the integration and packaging of a set of over 20 open-source development tools, such as BugZilla and SubVersion, to quickly help new developers assemble their application development environment.

Overall, CodeGear JBuilder 2007 has attempted to strike the right balance between open-source and commercial software, by providing developers and development teams with the enterprise-level tools and support they need in addition to the Eclipse IDE. With the announcement of open-source Java last week, you have to wonder if this approach will be taken by other software vendors across the industry.

-EJB

Posted by Eric Bruno at 11:13 AM  Permalink