Enhanced support for distributed development teams and code re-use

Application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor Borland has updated its software and configuration management system, StarTeam, claiming to provide better support for distributed development teams.

StarTeam 2008 is part of Borland's 'Change Management' system and uses a single data repository in tandem with remotely cached information.

"With the majority of companies using distributed development models today, it is critical to maintain a secure, scalable and reliable infrastructure for change management, while also keeping costs down," said Corné Human, director of product marketing for Borland

Its approach reduces the systems overhead and potential for propagating conflicting changes, compared to systems based on data replication, Borland claims. The elimination of duplicate server hardware centralisation gives significant cost savings, Human added.

Meanwhile, Borland's former Developer Tools Group, spun off as CodeGear in 2007, has also announced the availability of the latest version of its Eclipse-based Java integrated development environment (IDE), JBuilder 2008.

The major feature of the 2008 release of JBuilder is a collection of tools known as 'Application Factories', which CodeGear said is a "new approach to software development and code reuse".

Borland StarTeam 2008 and CodeGear JBuilder 2008 are both available now.