Borland announces Eclipse product roadmap - Computer Business Review

Borland announces Eclipse product roadmap - Computer Business Review

Fresh from its announcements last February that it was joining Eclipse and taking lead of a project to develop visual modeling, Borland has announced how the new strategy will impact product plans.

Borland is planning the release of two updates to JBuilder. The first, JBuilder 2006, will ship sometime during the second half of 2005 and be based on the original Borland visual framework. The Eclipse-ready release, code-named Peloton, will follow in early 2006.

ference being in the Eclipse shell and APIs, which the new version will use. Existing customers will be entitled to both releases if they are on a standard annual maintenance contract, and will be provided migration tools if they wish to go to Peloton.

At this point, Borland has no plans to sunset the existing product, although it naturally hopes that users will over the long term migrate to the Eclipse version. Borland bit the bullet last winter, joining Eclipse, because it said that's what its customers were demanding.

"This is what our customers have asked us for. The ones that have evaluated Eclipse saw great value in the integration framework," said Rob Chang, director of product marketing for developer products. Chang claims that Peloton will be designed to make it easy to use third-party plug-in tools that are Eclipse compliant.

Both JBuilder 2006 and Peloton will add new collaboration functionality. For instance, while the current version of JBuilder supports distributed refactoring, where developers can make changes to other projects in a repository, the new products will add peer-to-peer collaboration, which will allow multiple developers to view and manipulate the same code or objects simultaneously.

"This enables the notion of agile development and extreme programming, accommodating the push for distributed or outsourced development," said Chang.

Read complete article. . .