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AS OF 5/17/2008 6:08AM EST
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Borland Gets Together for Modeling
DSL Toolkit looks to overcome UML complexities
By Jeff Feinman
October 15, 2007 —
Borland Software today announced a new version of its Together modeling tool, shipping what it claims is the industry’s first platform-independent solution for domain-specific languages (DSLs).
The DSL Toolkit in Borland Together 2007 is designed to help organizations overcome the complexity of UML by allowing project teams to create model notations that cater to their own business needs. These notations can be used to create models of application architectures and business processes, and improve efficiency of modeling among project teams. Borland officials said that these capabilities are appealing to people who want to use modeling but don’t want to learn UML.
The DSL Toolkit provides organizations with the flexibility to create platform-neutral designs. It features metamodels, visual editors, model-to-model transformations, and model-to-text transformations and document templates. These are geared to helping users create a model that aligns with the needs of their business. It can allow a user to define their own domain model and complement that with proper diagrams and notations to suit their needs.
“What we’re looking to do with the DSL Toolkit is complement existing modeling standards and notations with the ability to fully customize and tailor to a specific business domain for that particular business,” said Richard Gronback, chief scientist at Borland.
Borland Together 2007 is based on the open source Eclipse framework and conforms to Object Management Group-sanctioned Model Driven Architecture-related standards, including Object Constraint Language, QVT (Queries/Views/Transformations), XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) and, of course, UML. Gronback said that this brings open source technology into the product line, providing an open and extensible set of underlying technologies for customers to use.
Borland Together 2007 can integrate with the .NET platform and provide sample diagrams. New language features and additional wizards can simplify the creation of transformations.
According to Marc Brown, vice president of product marketing for Borland, Borland Together 2007 was designed to offer a complementary set of modeling capabilities in a single product with broad appeal and applicability to business and IT analysts, architects and lead developers.
“If you look at the marketplace, there are many modeling tools, but many of them are very specific,” he said. “They may support UML, business process modeling or other types of notations, but they don’t give you a good single tool that you can train your enterprise on that not only provides notation support, but also provides transformation techniques and automation in between.”
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