Tool Time: Features Boost Developers' ProductivityTool Time: Features Boost Developers' Productivity

What more can be done to improve the productivity of in-house application developers? Improved collaboration, real-time communications, more-scalable source-control tools, and new approaches to application modeling are among the answers.

Dozens of vendors are working on new capabilities that promise to let programmers spend less time on mundane maintenance work and more on business-process alignment, project management, and software innovation. "The opportunity to help with better tools is significant," says Eric Rudder, senior VP of Microsoft's tools and platforms division.

The next big advances in Microsoft's product line will be manifest in Whidby, the code name for the next release of Visual Studio .Net, which is scheduled for beta testing in the first half of next year and general availability in the second half. Improvements to Visual Studio .Net's tool for source-code control, called Visual Source Safe, will make it possible for larger teams of developers to work together on bigger chunks of code. Whidby also will let software engineers write apps that can be deployed more quickly and with less effort to thousands of PCs.

In addition to those "bigger, better, faster" types of enhancements that you might expect in a next-generation development tool, Microsoft also will add collaboration and real-time communications capabilities of the kind increasingly used by business professionals. The company, for instance, is assessing how real-time conferencing might be used by developers. "We will build in lots of community features," Rudder says.

At Sun Microsystems, a lab project called Jackpot promises to make things easier for Java developers who write large-scale business applications. Java apps can become unwieldy when they reach 1 million lines of code, Java creator James Gosling says. "The amount of labor it takes to make changes to the system can be quite extraordinary," he says.

Jackpot addresses that by using a semantic model to build an application and make changes to it. Instead of having to comb through a program line by line to make changes to an app's methods or classes--software building blocks--a Java programmer could make the same tweaks with considerably less effort. Sun scientists are working on the user interface and visualization aspects of Jackpot now, though no decisions have been made on when or how to bring the technology to market.

A growing number of companies are using the Unified Modeling Language to garner similar advantages, and an upgraded version of the industry standard, UML 2.0, is due for approval next spring. The new spec will be more "semantically precise" than the current version and be able to scale to large and complex systems, says Bran Selic, a principal engineer with IBM's Rational division and chairman of the Object Management Group's UML 2.0 task force.

Developers who use UML 2.0 should be able to design and craft bigger, more-sophisticated applications with greater ease. IBM has already incorporated a prestandard version of UML 2.0 in its IBM Rational Rose Real-Time environment for building no-latency applications and plans to add the spec to its WebSphere Studio development environment after it has been approved. With new state-of-the-art tools, says Selic, developers "will be a lot more productive and capable of maintaining systems that are much more complex than what they do now."

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