Borland Software Corp. announced several new technologies at its Borland Conference last week, including a new version of its Delphi integrated development environment for .Net, a new modeling framework and a new integrated application lifecycle management solution for Java.

At the San Jose, Calif., conference, Borland announced Delphi 8 for Microsoft's .Net Framework. The new version is integrated with .Net and enables Delphi developers to build applications for .Net Framework and to migrate Win32 Delphi applications to .Net Framework, Borland officials said.

Delphi 8 supports all .Net Framework classes, Microsoft's ASP .Net Web Forms and XML Web services, Windows Forms, Microsoft ADO.Net, a .Net implementation of Borland's Visual Control Library, and Borland Data Provider for database applications.

"A lot of our customers are eager to build new applications for .Net or convert existing applications to .Net, and we see a lot of this happening in the first half of 2004 as the platform moves from Win32 to the managed code of .Net," said Simon Thornhill, vice president and general manager of Borland, in Scotts Valley, Calif.

At BorCon, the company also announced ECO, its new model-driven run-time platform for rapid development. ECO (Enterprise Core Objects) supports the Object Management Group's MDA (Model Driven Architecture) and UML (Unified Modeling Language).

ECO will be included in Delphi 8 for the Microsoft .Net Framework when it ships next month; it is in Borland C#Builder for the Microsoft .Net Framework Architect Edition as of now, company officials said.

In addition to MDA and UML, Borland's ECO technology supports the OMG's Object Constraint Language and XML Metadata Interchange and provides a set of wizards and components to facilitate rapid model-driven development.

Borland also announced Borland Enterprise Studio 7 for Java, a Java-based implementation of Borland's application lifecycle management solution that the company refers to as a unified development environment.

George Paolini, vice president and general manager of Java solutions at Borland, said, "Borland is trying to drive a solution around [application lifecycle management], and we have a level of integration around the modeling, development and testing aspects of the life cycle that are the best in the market."

Borland's Enterprise Studio 7 for Java is a single solution that features technology from several Borland products, including requirements and configuration management technologies from Borland's CaliberRM and StarTeam.