Closing The Developer-User GapClosing The Developer-User Gap

As software modeling becomes more sophisticated, the divide has narrowed between the software business users want and the code delivered.

Borland Software Corp. has upgraded Together 2006 modeling tools to include the ability to model business processes, using Business Process Modeling Notation, a standard graphical means of expressing business processes. Using the tools, business analysts can model business processes that can be carried forward into system designs and software models for applications, says Marc Brown, director of product marketing.

Business Process Modeling Notation is more precise than current modeling approaches because the business processes it captures can be more precisely translated into software models, yielding better results for business users. "The support for business-process modeling connects the line-of-business organization to the IT organization," Brown says. The business-process notation is ultimately transformed into the Unified Modeling Language 2.0 symbols and notation used for software modeling. Together 2006 modeling capabilities give business users and software architects and designers "a common language through visual models," he says.

Because the Together 2006 tools come in role-based versions, models can be shared between the business analyst's process diagram and tools that software architects, designers, and developers use. Developers need to refer to the model because they're responsible for keeping the code synchronized with it, Brown says. The improved toolset, which will work inside the Eclipse programmer's workbench, will ship in the third quarter.

Compuware Corp.'s OptimalJ 4.0 Java-development tool, unveiled last month, also models the business domain or business steps of an application in UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams. For the first time, applications built with its Developer edition can be edited inside the Eclipse workbench, product manager Mike Sawicki says. All future versions of OptimalJ will support Eclipse, which imposes a shared-file format on development projects, allowing different tools to work with the same code.

Compuware didn't support Eclipse before now because it was too much under the control of IBM, which created the programmer's workbench core code and contributed it as an open-source project. "There's a healthy ecosystem there, with momentum outside the IBM influence," Sawicki notes.

In addition to Developer, OptimalJ comes in Architecture and Professional editions that generate code from the UML 2.0 models. Programmers use the Developer edition to make additions to code that has been automatically generated by the Architecture and Professional tools. As part of OptimalJ 4.0, Compuware also offers an online collaborative exchange of best practices and sites for checking the quality of code under development.

Sun Microsystems has started an early-access program for its Java Studio Creator 2, the final version of which is due late this year. Creator is designed to take some of the complexity out of Java development by allowing developers to move around a graphical environment and add to an existing application framework.

Creator 2 is built on Sun's open-source NetBeans 4.1 integrated development environment, which allows automated reconfiguring of an application so it can, say, be moved from a client to a server system. Creator 2 also has an expanded set of JavaServer Faces components for building rich Web applications.

Oracle, in a bid to expand the Java developer community, offers its Oracle JDeveloper 10g Java tool as a free download. Oracle also wants to lead an Eclipse project on open-source tools for JavaServer Faces to simplify the building of Java user interfaces.