"The role that Borland is taking to drive modeling advancements within Eclipse will not only benefit the larger community, but also allows us to create a highly advanced, standardized foundation upon which to build our commercial products,” said Richard Gronback (pictured), co-leader of the Eclipse Modeling Project and chief scientist at Borland, as Borland yesterday announced a significant upgrade to its Together 2006 for Eclipse enterprise modeling product.

"We expect our use of Eclipse modeling technologies to give customers a greater degree of flexibility, usability, and richness without the risk of a proprietary platform,” Gronback added.

In order to optimize standards-compliance and interoperability benefits for customers, Borland will continue to invest in and leverage technology developed through the Eclipse Modeling Project for future releases of Together, said Gronback. The project, which promotes and develops model-based technologies within the Eclipse community, is being co-led by Borland and IBM.

Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 is based on the open source Eclipse 3.2 framework for software development, working directly within the Eclipse 3.2 shell.

It supports a multitude of open industry standards and languages ­including added support for modeling C++ applications ­to promote extensibility and customization especially when working in heterogeneous environments. Additionally, says Borland, the release is integrated with its recently introduced Caliber DefineIT requirements definition product, enabling users "to quickly build systems from requirements by creating UML and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) models," said Gronback.

• Expanded productivity for business analysts ­
  Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) support enables analysts to visually model business processes and workflows, which can then be traced to requirements and used throughout the lifecycle.
  
• Advanced MDA capabilities ­
  Complete Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) support aids architects in the definition and transformation of architectures from UML-based platform-independent models, which can target multiple platforms, to platform-specific models, such as for the such as for the .NET or Java EE platforms.
  
• SOA manageability ­
  The complex topology of Services-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is made easier to manage with Together's UML-based view of the entire system. Architects and designers can use Together to assess how new services will affect the existing architecture and how required changes can be implemented.
  
• Model and Code Quality Assurance ­
  Both code- and model-level audits and metrics can give teams significant productivity gains by assisting with architectural compliance, code compliance, code complexity and coding standards.