August 13th, Borland's subsidiary CodeGear announced JGear™, a set of specialised plug-ins for the Eclipse open-source development platform. JGear augments Eclipse in three areas - Java application performance, visual development and team collaboration. According to CodeGear, the top pain points for Java developers using Eclipse stem from the difficulties of application performance tuning , Java code archaeology, coding and configuring Java servers and frameworks, team collaboration
The new JGear product line includes - JGear™ Performance for Eclipse, JGear™ LiveSource® for Eclipse, and JGear™ Team for Eclipse (both Client and Server editions). JGear Performance contains a variety of performance and tuning features such as memory and CPU profiling and debugging; automatic detection of potential memory leaks; and real-time monitoring of programs' use of virtual machine memory. JGear LiveSource includes a graphical EJB workbench and Web services designer; Unified Modeling Language visualisation of code artefacts and design for analysing an application's design and implementation; CodeGear's LiveSource technology that simultaneously replicates changes to models in the code and vice versa to aid alignment between software architects and developers; and creation of Enterprise JavaBeans and model relationships. JGear Team offers a complete agile team collaboration and development system based on open-source components. JGear Team is both a turnkey server solution and an Eclipse developer client solution JGear Team Server is a team development server stack based on best of breed open-source components such as Subversion, Bugzilla, Continuum, and XPlanner. JGear Team Server includes ProjectAssist™ - the JGear Team administrator client for simple single-click server installation and configuration, team project creation, user administration and setup.
This is a normal evolution for CodeGear as the future is difficult in the software development IDE sector if you want to remain the supplier of an isolated solution. Competition with open source and free products like Eclipse or NetBeans is difficult to sustain. A better strategy is to offer additional services that could be missing in the core open source solution and that developers are ready to pay some dollars to obtain. Acting like this in the Eclipse ecosystems, CodeGear recognises that its survival may depend on its ability to transform itself from software producer to plug-in developer.
http://www.codegear.com/
http://www.eclipse.org/
