The company is launching Borland Together Architect, Together Designer and Together Developer, founded on Together ControlCenter and providing Unified Modeling Language (UML) design and modeling for architects, analysts and developers.
Borland will announce the products at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) 2004 conference, in Vancouver, Canada.
Unveiled last month, at the company’s annual BorCon Conference, the suites, codenamed Themis, form part of software delivery optimization (SDO), a strategy to provide greater input into the application lifecycle process by individuals normally outside of development and actually inside the business.
Raaj Shinde, vice president and general manger of Borland’s Together said SDO takes Borland’s two-year Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) pitch to the next level. We can get to a finer grained level of control, of development Shinde said.
Themis is also an attempt to bridge the current gap that exists between software development team members, who are often partitioned according to roles such as architect, developer and tester, by providing modeling tools that both speed development and produce highly scalable, model-based pieces of software.
Borland is attempting to do this by making Together ControlCenter’s modeling functionality and features available to a broader range of ALM team members.
Borland Together Developer, for example, provides basic modeling staples such as class diagrams, core objects, metrics and impact analysis, inside Microsoft Corp’s Visual Studio and Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).
Shinde believes once exposed to UML and Model Driven Architectures (MDA), developers will sieze on it to automate construction of applications.
Themis will also see Borland implement a standards-based transformation engine that turns models into code like Java or .NET, and which uses the emerging Query, View, Transform (QVT) standard from the Object Management Group (OMG). Support for QVT is scheduled for the first half of 2005.
Away from the developer focus, Borland Together Designer is a lightweight, stand-alone modeling environment that is unconnected to source code generation and is targeted at analysts. Together Architect, meanwhile, builds on both Designer and Developer by providing full, stand-alone modeling, code and structural management functionality, along with the full QVT transformation engine.
Together Designer and Developer will be available next month while a second version of the already available Together Architect, will be launched by Borland during the first half of next year, featuring the QVT transformation engine.
