Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Borland focuses on UML modeling

news
Oct 25, 20043 mins

ControlCenter is reconfigured into separate products

Borland Software this week is breaking up its Together ControlCenter package for UML modeling into separate products for developing, designing, and architecting applications.

The move is intended to align the Together platform with the company’s Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) strategy of providing a disciplined approach to development. SDO is intended to organize teams, technologies, and processes to boost the business value of software, according to Borland. Products being released as the follow-up to Control Center include Together Designer, Together Developer, and Together Architect.

Featured in the Together platform is support of UML 2.0, the company said. “[UML 2.0] provides you a structured schema or structure underneath your model that can later be used to automate generation of bits and pieces of your application,” said Tom Gullion, product manager for the Together business unit at Borland. The three products are interoperable with each other as well as with other Borland offerings such as StarTeam and CaliberRM.

Shipping in mid-December, Developer is a plug-in to IDEs such as Borland JBuilder or Eclipse. Plans call for it to fit into Visual Studio .Net in the first quarter of 2005. The offering provides core features such as synchronization of class diagrams and code through a more developer-centric vantage point, according to Guillion.

“We’re providing just the essential modeling features that we think developers need,” such as code visualization and the ability to generate a sequence diagram, Guillion said.

Integration of Together with tools such as Eclipse, JBuilder and Visual Studio .Net is a plus for Borland, said analyst Mike Gilpin, vice president and research director at Forrester Research. “I think what they are now doing is good in [that] they are opening up,” modeling capabilities of ControlCenter to others as well, he said.

“First of all, ControlCenter had for some time been one of the better environments in its capability to support a fully integrated capability of model-driven development,” Gilpin said.

A richer registry for Eclipse still is needed, however, to better enable Borland and IBM tools to better store meta data, according to Gilpin.

Designer, due in mid-November, is a standalone modeling tool supporting UML 2.0 diagramming for requirements modeling. Business process modeling is a highlight of Designer. Also featured is support of Object Constraint Language, for specifying constraints such as prerequisites for use of a feature.

Additionally, developers can import Rational Rose models into Designer natively. Previously, the XML Metadata Interchange standard needed to be used for this. “Now, it’s very easy to port all that existing Rose content into a Together model,” Gullion said.

Architect, which is shipping now, includes all the functionality of Designer and Developer as well as model-driven architecture support to enable transformations to be applied to models created in any of the three products, Borland said.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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