Santa Barbara, CA-based Catalyst Systems has announced general availability of the latest version of Openmake. Release 6.4 incorporates new features for project build activity scheduling and tracking, reporting tools for knowledge-base metrics analysis and added support for IBM- and Eclipse-based software development and PERL environments. Openmake supports developers by managing complex build tasks from project birth to maturity, all in a production ready environment.

Jim Duggan, research vice president for Applications Development at Gartner Research, stated, “Next to documentation, build management is likely to be the least satisfying task a developer must address every day. A lot of software investment ends up in the time it takes to constantly tweak the make files needed to keep a system maintainable. Developers are looking for innovative solutions that will reduce software coding by a factor of five.”

Whether supporting small development tasks or massively complex cross- platform solutions, Openmake takes a distinctive approach to supporting developers responsible for building software systems.

"Although Openmake already offers, on a daily basis, increased productivity and quality to the Fortis WebSphere Competence Centers (150 persons), compared to manually controlled builds, Openmake also completes the configuration management process through it's central build capabilities.  Owing to this, Fortis fully controls all internal and external software assets completely within the very fast evolving J2EE world,” commented Matthias Pyck, system advisor for Fortis Bank in Belgium.

 Whether helping a single developer or large integrated team, Openmake organizes and schedules system construction during informal and formal project life cycles. Through well-defined rules, reusable build scripts can create alternate versions of systems during portions of the lifecycle, providing automated regular incremental development builds; quality assurance builds and occasional emergency builds. Since developers can’t manually break make or Ant/XML files, Openmake’s approach improves quality and mitigates risk.

New features of Openmake 6.4 include a Build and Deploy Manager, Build Activity Schedule and enhanced Audit Reporting. Through audit information consistently recorded during build processes, Openmake can create advanced audit reports and impact analysis that helps isolate complex problems and improve quality. These reports also make it easier to isolate components during problem diagnosis by determining the pedigree of code executing in a complex system.

 Compatible with a variety of development language and tool environments including Eclipse-based solutions like IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, Borland and Microsoft .NET. Openmake integrates fully with version control systems from Rational, Serena and more, Catalyst says.