Codefast Teams with Borland to Ease Build Management

Published: May 16, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Java developers looking to streamline their build times and processes will be interested to hear that Codefast, a provider of tools to automate the build-management process, has teamed up with development tool maker Borland Software to integrate its PerfectBuild software into Borland's application lifecycle management (ALM) framework, called Gauntlet.

Much progress has been made in the development tool space since the 1980s, says Jon Gettinger, vice president of products for Codefast, a two-and-a-half-year-old company based in San Jose, California. "There have been incredible improvements in last 20 years on the front end, including design, coding, and modeling," he says. "But if you look at the build side of the problem, nothing much has changed."

Developers today still complete their builds--the process of bringing together the various bits of source code to generate a complete and usable application--largely by running a series of scripts on a server or workstation. This technique is proven and works, but doesn't scale as well as some would like, often takes hours to complete for large applications, and in general is a total hairball to manage. Gettinger calls it the "last unpaved mile" of application development.

The approach of scripting gives good results, but you tend to have a lot of artifacts around trying to express process, Gettinger says. "So as the organization grows, you can have thousands and thousands of scripts expressing all your intellectual property that you need to create product. These things are brittle. They're not very easy to work with in general."

Codefast's solution to this problem is PefectBuild, which it bills as a pattern-based build management system that takes the tedium out of the build process for Java, C, C#, and C++ developers. With support for parallel and incremental builds, the software enables the build process to be conducted anywhere from five times to 100 times faster, thereby allowing developers to create more builds, which can be tested at a faster rate, resulting in cleaner code.

On Monday, Codefast and Borland announced that PerfectBuild will be supported as a plug-in to Gauntlet, Borland's testing framework for Java development. Together, the two tools will enable developers to embark upon Continuous Integration and Testing (CIT) processes, which should result in cleaner, faster code.

"The analogy is they're the chassis and we're the engine--we create the build, and then you run the resulting output through a series of tests, the gauntlets," Gettinger says. "We all know developers want to get the code out, and so they need answers quick. With this announcement, users will get push-button continuous integration and testing, because it better be as push-button as possible."

As part of the agreement, Borland will be selling PerfectBuild integrated with Gauntlet. Pricing for the software was not available. PerfectBuild is available separately for $1,295 per user. For more information, visit www.codefast.com.

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