Borland quick to get Together UML support

By Alun Williams

Posted on 17 Feb 2003 at 13:31

It was only a few weeks ago that Borland completed its acquisition of Togethersoft - 15 January, to be precise - but Borland has already announced new editions of Java products.

The Together application management tools of Togethersoft have been incorporated with Borland's JBuilder (a Java development environment) and Borland Enterprise Studio for Java (a suite of development and deployment tools).

A standalone version of Together Edition for JBuilder will be available (supporting JBuilder 7 using JDK 1.3 and JBuilder 8, which is based on 1.4). Alternatively, the Together and JBuilder integration will be available as part of in Enterprise Studio, which also includes such products as Borland's Application Server. Its JdataStore product and the OptimizeIt suite for performance analysis.

LiveSource is the key element that Togethersoft brings to the party. With support for UML modelling (version 1.3 and a subset of 1.4), diagrams are generated solely from the source code, guaranteeing a current view of a project and an automatic form of documentation.

Through the UML support, LiveSource also has a quality assurance function. A variety of displays - such as grids and the concentric circles of Kiviat graphs - can indicate the status of specified project requirements. Information from Use Case property values, for example, can be used to build a requirements catalogue. What this means is that at any point in time the status of a project can be automatically gauged, in terms of meetings its specified aims.

A third major factor of LiveSource is support for Patterns - a way of formalising 'best practice' in design. Paul Kuzan, European Product Line Manager for Borland's Together division, emphasised to us that the Pattern support was completely customisable - developers were not restricted by the company's own implementation of patterns such as the Observer, Singleton or Abstract Factory.

The stand-alone version of the Borland Together Edition for JBuilder has an RRP of £2,666 and the Borland Enterprise Studio 5 for Java has an RRP of £4579.

You can find more info on Borland Enterprise Studio for Java at borland.com/estudiojava.