Meanwhile, Mercy Ships has recently begun looking at UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling and has been using Borland's Together tool to model specifications, Burton said.

"UML modeling with Together allows us to more effectively model specifications," Burton said.

But Burton cautioned that his organization's use of Together and UML is still in its early days.

"We are delving into the UML area," Burton said. "We've used some of the auditing requirements; we've done a little bit of work with the UML; we're still on a pretty steep learning curve in that area."

The challenges aren't strictly technological. One of the biggest is skill sets. "The trouble is, most of us have been around too long to have ever studied that at college or anything like that. So we're trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps on that. So it's an evolving area for us," Burton said.

Overall, Burton said he believes JBuilder is one of the leading products in its field.

Click here to read more about Borland's Together modeling tool.

"We never had any reason to think we could do any better in any other way," said Burton of JBuilder. However, he added, "What we're interested in in the next version [of JBuilder] is its Eclipse [open-source application development framework] integration. That's of interest to us—not so much because we're excited about what Eclipse will do for us, but because we're using a lot of open-source projects like Hibernate and the Spring framework, and those projects are starting to produce plug-ins for the Eclipse environment, which we're interested in looking at."

Further, Burton said that Mercy Ships does not "want to switch IDEs [integrated development environments] because we're quite happy with what JBuilder is doing for us. Therefore, the ability to continue with JBuilder and get the benefits of the Eclipse underpinnings and the ability to use the Eclipse plug-ins is something we're quite interested in. We just see that as a natural evolution to where we are now. We like the way JBuilder integrates with Together, although we're still learning what we can do with Together. It's such a well-integrated suite. We have never had to call support. It just works."

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.