We are formerly the tools group from Borland, the group that produced Delphi, all the Turbo C++, Turbo Pascal products, and of course, JBuilder.
At the end of last year, we released JBuilder 2007, which was the first JBuilder built on top of the Eclipse ecosystem. The focus of that release was to accelerate developer productivity, enhance team collaboration, and to enable Java application performance analysis and tuning.
Today we are releasing JGear, a set of Java development plug-ins that will work not only with our JBuilder Eclipse distribution, but also with any Eclipse-based IDE. We looked at what were the strongest pain points Java developers were encountering using Eclipse, and we wanted to address those with the JGear product. We found three such issues.
The first one is the lack of a cohesive visual development environment: Real two-way visual development that allows developers to both visually develop and to provide code archeology. Those are features developers were used to seeing in products like JBuilder or Together in the past.
We also found that although performance analysis and tuning capabilities in Eclipse were coming along, they were not at the level developers were accustomed to and really needed for complex Java applications.
The third thing we found was that while there are many team tools available that plug into Eclipse, they all plug into it individually, and they lack integration with each other to facilitate really collaborative development.
We developed the JGear products based on features in JBuilder: We've taken features and technologies out of JBuilder and built them as plug-ins into Eclipse. So these technologies can work in any developer's Eclipse environment.
Currently, we have three products in JGear, each corresponding to one of the problems I described earlier: JGear Performance, which is for performance analysis and tuning. It is based on the Optimize It technology that Java developers may already be familiar with.
Then we have the JGear's LiveSource plugin that adds a layer of visual development over the Eclipse technologies, whether they be Java source code, Enterprise Java Beans development and configuration, Web services, or JPA. LiveSource provides a full visualization of the source code in two-way models: The developer can develop in code or develop in models. The tool produces standard Java code from the visual environment so developers can take that source code and hand that off to other developers in other environments.
We're not doing all the UML diagrams, only the ones that apply to Java code class diagrams: for example, diagrams that show the static structure of an application. We also provide sequence and activity diagrams, and state charts that you use to describe the dynamic nature of the application.
All these can be generated either from source or linked to source. We wanted this to be really a focused tool for developers who are doing visual development, and who are working on complicated projects where they may need to do some code archeology. The developer can come in, use these tools, and very quickly get a handle on what the structure of the application is.
The third product is JGear Team, which comprises a server and a developer client component. The server encompasses a variety of popular open-source team development solutions that cover everything from project requirements to bug tracking and source code control and continuous integration, all the way down into developers' individual tasks that they have to manage of a day-to-day basis.
We deliver a complete open-source tool stack in this product: Bugzilla for bug tracking, Subversion powers the source code control—we also have a CVS option—Continuum powers the continuous integration features, and XPlanner powers the project management features.
We also integrate with Mylyn, which was formerly Mylar, to integrate the artifacts and actions from the team environment into individual developers' desktops. On the client side is an Eclipse development client that connects to the team server and provides all the integration from the team server into the developers' workstations.
The server has a portal that aggregates all the information from the different repositories and gives team members a combined view of their projects, how the bugs are tracking, what the completion dates look like, and so on. It gives them an aggregated view of all the information that's in all the different team tools.
What do you think of CodeGear's strategy in addressing the needs of Eclipse developers?
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