Borland focuses on UML modeling

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.