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Jolt Awards

The 13th Annual Software Development Jolt & Productivity Awards


DESIGN AND ANALYSIS TOOLS

Together WebSphere Studio Edition
Borland (formerly TogetherSoft)


Bill Pataky, Director of Product Management and Marketing; David Intersimone, VP of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist;
Arnaud Weber, Director of Research and Development

If you’re already working with IBM’s WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), Borland’s Together WebSphere Studio Edition 6.0 should whet your appetite. The software extends the IBM WebSphere Studio (WSS) enterprise development environment by taking the model-build-deploy cycle and adding a plug-in to provide the modeling capability. Developers familiar with the WebSphere look and feel should have no problem picking up this product. Using model-driven development, Together WebSphere Studio integrates into WebSphere, pumping it up with drag-and-drop UML modeling, real-time code synchronization, existing and customized pattern support and automatic documentation generation, as well as audit data and metrics.

The real-time code synchronization allows for model changes to be reflected immediately in your code base—and vice versa. The audit and metric data lets you track your code quality during development. You can generate HTML reports to describe cohesion, complexity and coupling in the source code. The auto documentation features can be used to customize HTML-generated docs based on your current UML model information in the familiar JavaDoc format. Together WebSphere Studio requires an additional 55MB of space on the various platforms supported by WSAD.

— Sue Spielman

Argo/UML
http://argouml.tigris.org/

Developers looking for an open-source tool to develop systems in Java using UML will find that Argo/UML meets many, if not all, of their needs. A pure Java CASE tool, Argo/UML focuses on helping developers with cognitive aspects of design; support for code generation and reverse engineering is less mature. It also offers a full-featured state chart editor, including concurrency modeling. The project uses open XML file formats XMI and PGML; with the source code freely available, enterprising developers can modify Argo/UML to meet their needs. Organizations needing support should look at Poseidon, a commercial implementation of Argo/UML (www.gentleware.com).

—Warren Keuffel

Codagen Architect
Codagen

In the never-ending quest to automate, Codagen Architect 3.0 steps up to the plate. This development process tool integrates with your favorite UML modeling tool, including Rational Rose, Together ControlCenter and Visio 2002 UML—a list that should cover most serious architects’ needs. Using a model-driven architecture approach, Codagen generates up to 100 percent of your application’s architecture source code and typically 70–90 percent of the total application code that can fit into either a J2EE or .NET framework, or both, the remainder (usually the business logic) to be created by the developer. Language support includes Microsoft Visual Basic, C#, C++ and Java. What makes this product stand out? It generates only pure source without any reference to a Codagen module, component or framework.

—Sue Spielman

SmartDraw
SmartDraw.com

SmartDraw is like discovering a gold mine and finding out it’s easy to get at the gold. This multiple award–winning product bows to your command: Want to draw a map? Simple. How about drawing a house plan with doors and windows? No problem. A UML diagram, organizational and flow charts, timelines, calendars, engineering and software designs? All easy to do, at various levels of detail, with expert results. SmartDraw’s secret? Symbol libraries—plenty of them, with more available on the SmartDraw website, offering free and full integration with MS Office for design and export. Along the way, SmartDraw makes drawing easier, yet more powerful. I’ve already made the switch.

—Rosalyn Lum


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