Borland Software yesterday announced the release of JBuilder 2006, the latest upgrade to its Java integrated development environment (IDE) designed to speed up industrial Java application development.
JBuilder 2006 includes new capabilities aimed at helping software teams more effectively collaborate in real time. New peer-to-peer developer collaboration features and integrated application lifecycle support for requirements management, source code management and unit testing are among the enhancements.
“Software development has become more complex than ever, as IT organizations are driven to do more with less, platforms and standards multiply, and development teams cross geographies and time zones,” said Boz Elloy, senior vice president of products at Borland. “In order to thrive in this new era, developers have to be able to work in unison, as a team, regardless of where they are.”
Elloy said JBuilder 2006 addresses the challenge by enabling remote teams to build software with the same feel as if they were in the same room, offering larger and dispersed teams the same levels of productivity previously reserved for smaller, localized teams.
Real-Time Collaboration
Borland said new peer-to-peer collaboration features enable developers to jointly perform code editing, visual design and debugging tasks in real-time. Additionally, distributed re-factoring and change management capabilities automatically propagate local changes to remote projects and provide automatic notification of changes to requirements.
Steve Garone, vice president for applications and integration infrastructure software at Ideas International, told TechNewsWorld that Borland’s offering is not completely unique to the marketplace, but these collaboration features are definitely in demand.
“There is a strong need to support these types of real time development activities where you can span groups and even organizations to some extent in terms of doing software development,” Garone said. “This will serve Borland well in terms of keeping pace with the market.”
Keeping Agile, Adaptable
Borland said agile programming methodologies seek to mitigate the risk and impact of change in the development process. “Agile” describes a number of software development methodologies, including Extreme Programming, SCRUM and Crystal, that lend themselves to an easy to adapt process.
Because they advocate close collaboration between the development team and business experts with frequent face-to-face communication, the company said agile methods have traditionally been relegated to smaller, highly local, self-organizing teams. Borland said JBuilder 2006 brings agile capabilities to larger and more distributed development teams by enabling them to utilize pair programming techniques through real-time, peer-to-peer collaboration.
JBuilder 2006 is also designed to give developers the tools they need to help identify and reduce security hazards throughout the development process. The app includes technology from Borland partner Fortify Software to analyze code and identify security vulnerabilities using best practices and automated code audits.
Avoiding Hazards
Borland also introduced a new version of its Optimizeit application performance management toolkit, its latest solution for isolating and resolving performance hazards during the development of J2EE applications.
Both JBuilder and Optimizeit are important components of Borland’s application lifecycle management (ALM) solution, according to the company. The new versions being introduced today are tightly integrated with other Borland ALM products including the CaliberRM requirements management solution. Borland said its goal is to give developers integrated tools to increase their own productivity as well as that of the entire softwareorganization.
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