SD West Bears Development Fruit - Software Development Times On The Web

SD West Bears Development Fruit
By Alex Handy

April 15, 2007 — SANTA CLARA — The SD West conference, held here in late March, played host to development tools vendors both new and old, with a distinct focus on the build cycle and on peer code review.

One of the newcomers to SD West was Australia-based Cenqua. This development tools company showed off its three source-code-oriented products; Clover, Crucible and Fisheye. Fisheye allows managers to analyze team efficacy by monitoring activity in source code repositories. Clover, Cenqua’s code test coverage analyzer, was available in a newly released version 2, and has added refined interfaces for dealing with Maven and Ant. Crucible, which made its debut at the show, offers a way for peer code review to be broken up by employee, allowing developers to look over and annotate reviewed code on their own timetables, rather than in one large meeting.

Codefast used SD West to introduce its new build automation and management solution. PerfectBuild 2007 gives developers a GUI-based management system for handling the myriad dependencies associated with their builds, and for running nightly tests. Codefast offers its own database for handling the information on dependencies, and can farm out builds to dynamically created grids.

Source code search engine, Koders.net, announced the beginning of a public beta

for the desktop version of its search tool. Koders Professional Edition allows programmers to search through any code stored on their hard drives quickly and efficiently.

Back on the build side of the business, OpenMake Software announced that it would be breaking some elements of its flagship OpenMake build management solution into a free standalone automation product. Mojo 7.0 can handle build scheduling, automated script execution and version differencing capabilities, all in a free package. Chief operating officer Tracy Ragan said that the company still has many other methods of speeding the build cycle, and that Mojo should help introduce users to OpenMake’s other products.

Smart Bear Software released a new product specifically targeted at distributed peer code review. Smart Bear Code Reviewer is a server-based solution that provides a Web window to repositories, allowing teams all around the world to collaborate online when reviewing members’ code.

SourceGear showed preview versions of Vault and Fortress. Vault is a source code management system designed to be friendly to top- and bottom-level coders, and to work easily with both customer-

facing and back-end code. Vault 4.0 will add support for new IDEs and operating systems. SourceGear Fortress, on the other hand, is a new product that offers ALM control in a modestly priced package.

Trolltech released two new betas. The first is a preview edition of its Qt cross-platform development framework, and the second is the mobile development framework, Qtopia. Qt 4.3 will add support for Windows Vista and improved performance with OpenGL for 3D effects within GUIs. Qtopia 4.3 offers optimizations and speed enhancements that will improve overall performance on many handsets.

And finally, as its name implies, Vangard Voice Systems was enabling voice recognition within enterprise applications. The company’s new version of AccuSPEECH adds support for dynamic database modifications, thus allowing developers to change the data behind a voice-driven application without the need to recompile the entire program.

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