Teamstudio Supports Notes/Domino 8

November 27, 2007 Alex Woodie

TeamStudio recently launched Teamstudio Edition 24, a new release of its suite of development and productivity tools for Lotus Notes and Domino developers. With this release, Teamstudio delivers support for Notes and Domino version 8, and delivers several other enhancements.

The Teamstudio suite is a collection of client- and server-side utilities that provide Notes and Domino developers with a variety of useful functions for designing, programming, maintaining, and fixing their applications. The suite is made up of a handful of individual products, including Analyzer, CIAO, Delta, and Snapper, all of which now support the latest release of Notes and Domino from IBM.

The CIAO version control system also introduces support for branching and merging. Branching and merging will be very useful when teams of programmers in busy development shops need to support multiple versions of an application, according to Craig Schumann, senior vice president of R&D at the Beverly, Massachusetts, company.

“IT organizations rarely work on one version of an application in isolation,” Schumann says. “One team could be working on changes to the 2.0 version, while another team is completing updates to version 1.5 of the same application. Branching basically allows developers to continue working on new features while still being able to support older versions of the application design.”

Another major new feature added to CIAO is the capability to integrate with an issue tracking system. While CIAO already documented all application design changes in an audit trail, the capability to hook CIAO to an issue tracking system will provide a clearer picture about where the enhancement request or bug report originated. This new technology is a major step forward in achieving a high level of IT governance within the development phase of ALM,” says Ian Smith, president of Teamstudio.

Other components of the Teamstudio suite were also enhanced, including Teamstudio Delta, which tells developers the differences between any two databases, and Teamstudio Analyzer, a database design analysis tool used for testing or debugging applications. In addition to support for Notes/Domino 8, Delta gains supports for the merging of elements from one database to another, while Analyzer gains a new audit feature that runs on save, and a new advanced filter function.