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NEW YORK—CodeGear is helping to bring Java further into real-world development situations with the release of its new JGear plug-ins for Eclipse.
At the Real-World Java Seminar here Aug. 13, CodeGear officials demonstrated some of the companys new specialized plug-in products for the Eclipse open-source development platform. JGear both augments and accelerates the open-source platform and tools in three key areas, Java application performance, visual development and team collaboration, said David Intersimone, CodeGear vice president of developer relations.
Company officials said the capabilities in JGear are not addressed by Eclipse-based IDE (integrated development environment) solutions today.
Up to now, the capabilities in JGear have only been available in CodeGears JBuilder 2007, Intersimone said. JBuilder is based on Eclipse and combines the capabilities of the Eclipse open-source platform with the kind of visual development functionality, ease of use and application performance tuning that CodeGear and its parent company, Borland Software, have been known for, he said.
The new JGear product line consists of JGear Performance for Eclipse, JGear LiveSource for Eclipse, JGear Team Client for Eclipse and JGear Team Server for Eclipse.
JGear Performance for Eclipse contains a variety of performance and tuning features, such as memory and CPU profiling and debugging, automatic detection of potential memory leaks, and real-time monitoring of programs use of virtual machine memory.
JGear LiveSource for Eclipse includes a graphical EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) workbench and Web services designer that eases rapid application development for both novice and experienced J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) developers; UML (Unified Modeling Language) visualization of code artifacts and design for analyzing an applications design and implementation; CodeGears LiveSource technology, which simultaneously replicates changes to models in the code and vice versa to aid alignment between software architects and developers; and easy creation of EJB and model relationships, Intersimone said.
CodeGears JGear Team Client for Eclipse delivers the companys TeamInsight technology from JBuilder 2007 to provide individual developers with a unified, real-time view of their project responsibilities and help them spot bugs, change requests, code notes and tasks, he said. JGear Team Client also includes CodeGear extensions to the Eclipse open-source Mylyn project (formerly called Mylar). Mylyn is described as a task-focused user interface for Eclipse that makes multitasking easier by making tasks a first-class part of Eclipse and integrating editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac and JIRA.
The JGear Team Server for Eclipse plug-in includes JGear Team Client and ProjectAssist, a single-point installation and configuration of a developer tool stack for bug tracking, source code management, project planning, requirements management and continuous integration, Intersimone said.
All four products are available for Eclipse 3.2, and CodeGear intends to include support for the recently announced Eclipse version Europa (Eclipse 3.3) later in 2007, he said.
“For those customers that already have an Eclipse distribution but are struggling with things like team enablement, we developed the JGear plug-ins,” Intersimone said. “Weve taken the LiveSource capabilities of JBuilder and put it into an Eclipse plug-in you can install.”
Click here to read about CodeGears online virtual developers conference.
Intersimone also gave a quick peek at CodeGears road map for its Java developer tools, including the concept of “application factories” that the company will deliver on in the future. Intersimone described application factories as “application generation for Java. Its a way of defining more of the application you want to start with.” In essence, the application factories approach would include looking at Java applications and defining common templates that can be used in future projects to create new applications, he said.
As some of the talk at the conference focused on Java futures, Intersimone said CodeGear is committed to moving JBuilder forward and moving its product line forward as the Java platform progresses from Java 5 to Java 6 and on to Java 7. “The bottom line is its all about Java,” he said. “Were committed to Eclipse, but in the end its all about Java. Were still very active in the JCP [Java Community Process].”
In addition, Intersimone discussed some of the differences in the ways Borland and CodeGear approach the market.
“The way we look at it is theres an enterprise life cycle that covers everything; thats what Borland does,” Intersimone said. “Were really focused on the life cycle within the developer project process. We dont offer portfolio management and other things that Borland does. But even within the developer space, theres a life cycle with debugging, check-in/check-out, planning, etc.”
The JGear plug-ins are designed specifically as plug-ins for Eclipse-based IDEs such as MyEclipse, IBM Rational Application Developer, BEA Workshop, Turbo JBuilder and internally configured Java-based Eclipse IDEs, said Michael Swindell, CodeGears vice president of products and strategy.
“JBuilder 2007 includes all of the functionality contained in the JGear plug-ins, so if a JBuilder customer is looking for this functionality they should look to JBuilder and JBuilder Enterprise,” Swindell said.
The four JGear products will be available around Aug. 20 in English, German, French and Japanese, CodeGear officials said. JGear Performance for Eclipse 3.2 costs $299, JGear LiveSource for Eclipse 3.2 is $299, JGear Team Client for Eclipse 3.2 is $399 and JGear Team Server for Eclipse 3.2 is $599. All but JGear Performance and JGear Team Server for Eclipse 3.2 support Windows, Mac OS X and Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4. JGear Performance supports Windows and Linux only, and JGear Team Server for Eclipse 3.2 supports Windows only.
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