Borland Software Corp. this week is expected to announce the release of the latest version of its Java integrated development environment, which will allow developers to collaborate more effectively.

Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland, said JBuilder 2006 features new capabilities such as peer-to-peer developer collaboration and integrated application life-cycle support for requirements management, modeling, source code management and unit testing.

In addition, JBuilder 2006 represents the last major release of Borland's Java IDE based on the company's core Primetime platform, said Patrick Kerpan, chief technology officer at Borland, in Cupertino, Calif. Major JBuilder releases next year and beyond will be based on the open-source Eclipse application development platform, Kerpan said at the EclipseWorld conference in New York last week.

"One of the big thrusts going into JBuilder 2006 was to better support development in distributed organizations," Cheng said. "To better enable teams to work together, and to provide the same level of collaboration you find in local teams and distributed teams, we delivered a peer-to-peer development model to support developer collaboration. This allows users to view and manipulate files and artifacts on each other's machines."

Indeed, all the things individual developers do can be done jointly with JBuilder 2006, Cheng said. In addition, JBuilder 2006 has a chat feature that works like a typical instant messaging system.

Eclipse Foundation plans projects in life-cycle support, modeling, embedded systems and data management. Click here to read more.

"With our situation with developers spread all over the U.S. and one in Scotland, this capability brings together things we've been doing with third-party tools and Skype," said Kelvin Burton, CTO at Mercy Ships, in Garden Valley, Texas. "What we've seen of this technology would be really helpful to us. The built-in chat is great—having everything integrated will make it easier to use. We like the idea enough that we want to use it as soon as we can get our hands on it."

JBuilder 2006 also includes technology from Fortify Software for analyzing code and identifying security vulnerabilities using best practices and automated code audits.

In addition to JBuilder 2006, Borland announced a new version of its Optimizeit application performance management tool kit—the company's solution for isolating and resolving performance problems during the development of J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications.

In addition, Borland will play out its SDO (Software Delivery Optimization) strategy and parlay the new JBuilder 2006 features into the company's CoreDeveloper technology—the developer role within the Borland Core SDP (Software Delivery Platform) platform.

Kerpan said Borland is working on a new generation of tools that will use Eclipse as the underlying integration framework. A future offering, code-named Peloton and due in the first half of next year, will be the first of Borland's Eclipse-based products and will bring enhanced usability, advanced collaboration features, ALM (application lifecycle management) integration and enterprise-class support to Eclipse, Kerpan said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.