Sybase, Inc. has announced WorkSpace, a unified Eclipse-based application development environment designed to meet the challenge of developing a service-oriented architecture (SOA). With Sybase WorkSpace, developers are finally given a tool to easily and rapidly close the gap between the vision of an SOA environment and the reality of traditional development tools, the company says. 

The industry’s first development environment to include modeling, data management, services assembly and orchestration, Java development and mobilization in a single tool, Sybase WorkSpace enables developers to quickly build and deliver many different kinds of applications: from event- and data-driven applications to composite, model-driven and mobile applications. Sybase WorkSpace also enables the development of applications that leverage heterogeneous infrastructures, including those based on J2EE, .NET and legacy applications.

“Service-oriented development of applications is not just the latest development craze. Instead, it is a strong development style that leads to substantial returns on investment and cost reduction. The most likely and most appropriate style in the ‘real world’ will be mixed, which includes RAD, architected rapid application development (ARAD) and AMD (Architected model-driven) in an appropriate manner,” said Matthew Hotle and Michael J. Blechar of Gartner, Inc. in their research note SODA Reuse Model: ROI and Cost Savings, published in October 2004.

“Sybase WorkSpace represents a gigantic step toward the new development paradigm – one that enables developers to build tomorrow’s applications today,” said Dr. Raj Nathan, senior vice president, Information Technology Solutions Group, Sybase, Inc. “It is a substantial evolution that liberates developers by providing them with a modular approach as opposed to a monolithic approach for current architecture challenges. Delivering a comprehensive SODA environment, Sybase WorkSpace encourages and facilitates creative application development and provides developers with the all the tools they need to stay on the cutting edge.”

Using the Eclipse platform, a popular open source Java-based plug-in framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, Sybase WorkSpace offers comprehensive development tooling that automates mundane tasks and reduces the overall complexity of application development. At the same time, Sybase WorkSpace enables composite application development and faster time to deployment, for lower operational and development costs.

“In today’s high-speed business environment, developers need the ability to respond quickly to constantly changing business needs,” said Karen Frederiksen, director, Application Development Technologies, Sybase, Inc. “Sybase WorkSpace provides a powerful combination of SODA tools that empower developers to leverage the productivity of graphical development while also utilizing the flexibility of code for complicated scenarios. Development with Sybase WorkSpace is flexible, enabling developers to choose the right combination of tooling functionality depending on the characteristics of the targeted application.”

Features

• Enterprise Modeling: Sybase WorkSpace supports requirements analysis and design; data and replication modeling; object modeling (using UML); and process modeling. It also enables reverse engineering of heterogeneous environments, for clear visibility into the enterprise, as well as automated script and code generation, for faster development.
• Data Tooling: Sybase WorkSpace is designed to make data transparent to developers. Graphical development of SQL statements, coupled with advanced editing and debugging of stored procedures, triggers, and database events, enable developers to rapidly deploy data-driven applications. Demonstrating its expertise in this area, Sybase is currently leading a Data Tools Platform project with the Eclipse organization and its members.
• Services Creation and Assembly: Sybase WorkSpace uses graphical tools for creation of services, message transformation, and orchestration of services into composite applications and automated processes. It allows developers new to SOA concepts to quickly leverage existing assets as services in a heterogeneous infrastructure.
• Mobile Capabilities: Sybase WorkSpace includes tooling to mobilize data, applications, services and processes quickly, with support for both online and offline access.