Borland® Together® 2007 Delivers New Capabilities to Help Companies Increase Business Agility and Lower Application Maintenance Costs
New release adds platform-independent support for domain-specific languages (DSLs); drives down the cost and complexity of Model Driven Development™
Austin, Texas - Oct 15, 2007 : Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL, www.borland.com), the global leader in Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), today announced significant enhancements to its visual, standards-based modeling product with the release of Borland® Together 2007®.
Borland Together 2007 is a comprehensive modeling product providing unique support for Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®), Business Process Modeling Notation (BPNM™), Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling and domain-specific languages (DSLs) within a single tool. With new support DSLs, Borland Together 2007 helps accelerate the delivery of high-quality enterprise applications through the creation of rich visual models that capture business requirements and associated architectures within a specific business domain.
“The value of modeling solutions is evolving from traditional architect and developer-centric productivity tools to a more business-centric activity that helps ensure a common understanding of a system through domain-specific models and visualization,” said Richard Gronback, co-leader of the Eclipse Modeling Project and chief scientist at Borland. “Borland is helping customers leverage the advancements in DSLs to simplify the software design process and increase the applicability and value of modeling across the entire business.”
As the complexity of applications and business processes continues to rise, so does the importance of integrating Model Driven Development™ techniques into the software delivery lifecycle. Borland Together 2007 helps organizations deal with complexity by allowing project teams to create models that provide a blueprint for business processes, data structures and application and enterprise architectures. These models are essential for assuring architectural soundness and effective communication and collaboration among project teams and business stakeholders.
Whether changing business processes, creating new applications or extracting design information from existing systems, Borland Together 2007 enables project teams to work more efficiently towards building and implementing flexible, adaptable and maintainable software architectures. In particular, it helps organizations improve recurring architectural problems such as application maintenance, software reuse, internal documentation and other fundamental application requirements.
Cutting-edge, platform-independent support for DSLsBorland Together 2007 further enables companies to improve business agility and lower application maintenance costs through the delivery of platform-independent support for domain-specific languages (DSLs). The product’s unique DSL Toolkit is designed to help organizations overcome the complexity of UML models by allowing project teams to create model notations aligned with their own business domain. These created notations can then be used to create models representative of application architectures and business processes within the context of their own business. DSLs help to improve the usability of modeling, eliminate unnecessary overhead and optimize communication and efficiency between software practitioners and business stakeholders.
Gartner has stated, "Don't view DSLs as competing with, or in some way mutually exclusive to, UML. There will always be a need for general-purpose modeling methods, but in the future, modeling must increasingly close the gap between the business and IT organization. When DSLs are targeted and used correctly, they can help achieve this.” (1)
The DSL Toolkit provides organizations with the flexibility to create platform-neutral designs that target multiple platforms, enabling architects to transform designs into platform-specific models. The toolkit consists of metamodels, visual editors, model-to-model transformations, model-to-text transformations and documentation templates, enabling users to create a complete modeling solution that aligns with the exact needs of their business.
Additional new and enhanced capabilities for Together 2007 include:
- .NET support with C# code generation – in addition to Java™ and C++ code generation, it’s now possible to generate C# source code from UML 2 Models, to support multi-platform and .NET platform specific development projects.
- Visual brainstorming notation – allows for ideas and associated notations to be delivered with full sources to serve as an example of how to implement DSLs. The sample diagram can be used to represent ideas, tasks or other topics arranged around a central key item or idea, and because it is actually built in the Together DSL Toolkit it can be tailored to specific business needs.
- Extended Queries/Views/Transformations (QVT) features – new language features and additional Wizards to simplify the creation and implementation of transformations.
- Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) reporting – BIRT support enhances the capabilities of documentation generation in a standardized way.
Borland Together 2007 is based on the open source Eclipse framework and conforms to Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®) standards: UML, XML Metadata Interchange (XMI®), QVT and Object Constraint Language. Borland is also influencing MDA technology, specifically QVT, by contributing breakthrough model transformation technology that today enables architects to transform any type of Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)-based model into other standard model types.
Borland Together 2007 is available today. For more information on Borland Together 2007 and related technologies, visit: http://www.borland.com/us/products/together/index.html.
About BorlandFounded in 1983, Borland (NASDAQ: BORL) is a leading vendor of Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions – open to customers’ processes, tools and platforms – providing the flexibility to manage, measure and improve the software delivery process. To learn more about maximizing the business value of software, visit http://www.borland.com.
Borland, Together and all other Borland brand and product names are service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of Borland Software Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Model Driven Development, Unified Modeling Language, UML, Model Driven Architecture, MDA, BPNM and all other OMG brand and product names are service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of Object Management Group, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Java and all other Sun brand and product names are service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
1 "Gartner, Inc., "View DSLs and UML as 'Fraternal Twins,' Not Competitors” by David Norton, September 29, 2006.
Safe Harbor StatementThis release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined under the U.S. Federal Securities Laws, including the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and is subject to the safe harbors created by such laws. Forward-looking statements may relate to, but are not limited to, the features available in, and the potential benefits to be derived from, Borland products and solutions, and the release dates, plans and market acceptance of such products and solutions, including Borland Open ALM products and solutions. Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations that involve a number of uncertainties and risks that may cause actual events or results to differ materially. Factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially include, among others, the following: rapid technological change that can adversely affect the demand for Borland products, shifts in customer demand, shifts in strategic relationships, delays in Borland’s ability to deliver its products and services, software errors or announcements by competitors. These and other risks may be detailed from time to time in Borland periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, its latest Annual Report on Form 10-K and its latest Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, copies of which may be obtained from www.sec.gov. Borland is under no obligation to update its forward-looking statements. Information contained in our website is not incorporated by reference in, or made part of this press release.