Eiffel Software Announces Release of EiffelStudio 6.1

Latest Release Brings EiffelStudio Towards Full ECMA/ISO Implementation

Santa Barbara, CA, November 19, 2007 -- Eiffel Software announced today the release of EiffelStudio 6.1, the latest version of its award-winning Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This major release brings EiffelStudio closer to full Implementation of the ISO standard of the Eiffel language and offers sophisticated new debugging mechanisms.

“It is a good feeling to see that EiffelStudio now integrates most of the Eiffel standard as defined by ECMA and the International Standards Organization” said Emmanuel Stapf, Senior Software Developer with Eiffel Software. “This release has focused on bringing numerous tangible benefits to our customers and the response to beta releases has been tremendous.”

EiffelStudio 6.1 brings the programming community closer to the full implementation of the ISO Eiffel Standard specification, in particular through the following innovative mechanisms, unique to Eiffel, version 6.1 introduces major features and mechanisms:

• Basic elements of the ISO-standard attached type mechanism, which will allow programmers to guarantee the absence of “null pointer dereferencing”, the major source of run-time crashes in object-oriented programs.
• Non-conforming inheritance, a first among object-oriented languages, providing a more flexible notion of inheritance.

In addition to these language advances, EiffelStudio introduces important environment advances:

• True Execution Replay in debugger, an industry first: allows user to play execution back and forth, recreating previous states after an error has occurred. Ordinary debuggers  only go forward; but when an error has occurred it is too late to find the cause..
• New default layout for EiffelStudio tools to highlight the most common used tools.
• New Errors and Warnings tool providing a sophisticated, user-configurable way show of showing and filtering errors.
• Major usability improvements throughout the EiffelStudio GUI.
• Direct connection to the Eiffel Software support site, so that  EiffelStudio can automatically submit a bug report when it quits unexpectedly.
• Support for the MinGW C compiler on Windows 32-bit. Borland is officially not supported anymore.
• Significant compiler speed-up

Details on these and many other new features of EiffelStudio 6.1 are listed at:

http://docs.eiffel.com/eiffelstudio/tools/eiffelstudio/reference/02_what_s_new/Eiffel61.html.

• Windows Classic, .NET, and 64 bits
• Linux, Linux PPC and 64 bits
• FreeBSD
• Solaris 10 on Sparc, Sparc-64, x86 and x86-64
• SGI Irix
• VMS, Embedded ...

EiffelStudio 6.1, comes with dual licensing. Users can decide between the Commercial License or the Open-Source license of the environment. A full feature evaluation edition is available from Eiffel Software website at http://www.eiffel.com/downloads/ so that prospects can experience the full power of the environment before purchasing it.

"EiffelStudio 6.1 is a major release bringing lots of new features and tools to the software community," said Larry Miller, Director of Business Development at Eiffel Software." The most exciting one for me is "Execution Replay" facility in the debugger. When you find the manifestation of a bug -- say a wrong value, or a crash -- it's always too late to understand what happened. You want to play the execution backward. That's what you can do in 6.1."

EiffelStudio is based on the widely acclaimed Eiffel programming language, the most extensive implementation of object-oriented concepts, standardized through ECMA and the International Standards Organization. Its core concepts, native only to Eiffel, such as Design-by-Contract, multiple inheritance, genericity, conversions and agents  allow developers to write high quality applications that are easy to maintain. Eiffel, which recently received the prestigious ACM Software Systems Award, is used by developers and design-team leaders in challenging enterprise environments in the financial, insurance, manufacturing, health, and government sectors as well as by independent development teams.
 

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