The company provides a three-year road map for its Java development platform, saying the technology is not going anywhere.SAN FRANCISCO—Borland Softwares Developer Tools Group has unveiled a three-year road map for its JBuilder Java integrated development environment.
Borlands Developer Tools Group announced on May 16 at the JavaOne conference here that the JBuilder road map includes an update to JBuilder 2006 and a new underlying framework based on Eclipse in JBuilder 2007, code-named Peloton. The road map also provides information on future features of the product, including new team collaboration and developer productivity features, support for new Java standards and emerging open-source tools and frameworks, enhanced support for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and more, company officials said.
In short, the message from the Borland Developer Tools Group, internally known as "Devco" since Borland is in the process of divesting the group, is that JBuilder is alive and kicking and they intend to continue to innovate around the popular Java development tool that had led the Java IDE space for years before feeling the pressure of the Eclipse open-source development environment.
Key points in the road map include: a free JBuilder 2006 Foundation edition available for download now; two new JBuilder 2006 updates planned for release this year; and the next major release of JBuilder, Peloton, expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
"Over the coming years JBuilder will continue to provide the same innovative features and ease-of-use that users have come to expect from the JBuilder franchise, but will increasingly appeal to developers who want to leverage Eclipse plug-ins, open-source tools and emerging development paradigms like SOA," said Michael Swindell, senior director of product management for Borlands Developer Tools Group, in a statement. "As we form the new developer-focused organization, were committed to moving JBuilder and our other IDE products into the future—continuing Borlands tradition of simplifying complex development problems and helping customers build better software, faster."
Borland officials said the Developer Tools Group expects to release an update to JBuilder 2006 in June to support Sun Microsystems Java SE 6, code-named Mustang, and an additional service pack in the fall of 2006 once Sun formally releases Mustang. Peloton, or JBuilder 2007, will come out by the end of the year and will marry the JBuilder technology with the extensible open-source Eclipse framework.
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Meanwhile, Borland officials said the Developer Tools Group plans to leverage open-source Java frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate and Shale into the Borland JBuilder experience.
Future versions of JBuilder are expected to include an SOA cockpit to simplify SOA application development, company officials said. SOA tooling today is a disparate set of tools and JBuilder going forward will provide a better way to develop, assemble, orchestrate and deploy SOA applications through a single tooling environment, officials said.
JBuilder also will further integrate with application lifecycle management tools from Borland and others in future releases, officials said.
In other news, Borland joined IBM and others in leading a new Eclipse Modeling Project in the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Modeling Project is a top-level project for Eclipse that will focus on the evolution and promotion of model-based development technologies within the Eclipse community. Richard Gronback of Borland Software and Ed Merks of IBM are the project co-leaders and are teaming to continue to advance Eclipse modeling technologies and to drive adoption of open standards related to software modeling, according to the Eclipse Foundation.
Current projects within the Eclipse Modeling Project effort include: the Eclipse Modeling Framework, or EMF, which is a modeling framework and code-generation facility for building tools and other applications based on a structured data model; the Graphical Modeling Framework, which provides the fundamental infrastructure and components for developing visual design and modeling surfaces in Eclipse; UML (Unified Modeling Language) 2.0, which is based on the Object Management Group specification and is an EMF-based implementation of the UML 2-based metamodel for the Eclipse platform; and Generative Modeling Tools, which aims to produce a set of research tools in the area of model-driven software development.
Other companies involved in the Eclipse Modeling Project include Compuware, ILOG, Omondo and Oracle.
Meanwhile, Borland also announced an upgraded version of its SilkTest testing software that the company acquired when it bought Segue Software earlier this year. SilkTest 8.0 offers new features to help automate testing efforts. The new version adds support for testing Eclipse-based applications and those applications running on the latest Internet browser and Microsoft .Net 2.0 environments, Borland officials said.
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