News

Borland’s Together 2005 Adds UML 2.0 and Role-based Work Model

• By Stuart J. Johnston
• 04/21/2005

Borland is shipping a major release of its modeling suite for Visual Studio. Among key new features, Together 2005 for Visual Studio.Net adds support for Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0 and introduces a role-based work model.

“Modeling can reduce project work, enhance communications across developer teams, and minimize costs [and] role-based tools offer enormous productivity gains,” says Marc Brown, Borland’s director of marketing for the Together and CaliberRM product lines.

This is the third release of Together, but the first to feature role-based modeling. The suite features two new role-based components. Designer is designed for use by architects and analysts who need to validate software design as well as model requirements.

Developer’s audience, meanwhile, is programmers who need to reduce complexity, improve quality and more easily understand their existing code base, according to a presentation by company executives. Both plug directly into Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET 2003.

Both Designer and Developer support UML 1.4, and Designer also supports the newer UML 2.0 diagramming specification. UML Object Constraint Language is also supported. In addition, users of Designer can search directly on diagrams. In addition, Designer can import IBM Rational Rose .mdl diagrams.

An important feature in Developer is what’s known as refactoring. “[In refactoring,] a developer can go back later and change the name of a class and it will automatically be refactored into the code, [that is] automatically updated throughout all of the source code,” Brown adds. An audit capability assures that developers are following corporate standards and guidelines.

Together 2005 costs $1,000 per user for Developer and $1,500 per user for Designer.