Eiffel Software Announces Release of EiffelStudio 6.2

Numerous New Tools for High-Reliability Software

Santa Barbara, CA, May 19, 2008 -- Eiffel Software announced today the release of EiffelStudio 6.2, the latest version of its award-winning Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Like previous releases, 6.2 is available on all major industry platforms, from Windows to UNIX, Linux, VMS and many others. 6.2 is a major step forward enabling Eiffel users to benefit from a set of new mechanisms with no counterparts in any existing IDE, directly translating into advances in software quality and productivity.

“There are so many innovations in 6.2 that it’s hard to spotlight any particular one”, said Emmanuel Stapf, Senior Software Developer with Eiffel Software, “but if I had to choose it would be the unit testing and contract development tools, which leverage on Eiffel’s unique Design by Contract mechanism. Companies select EiffelStudio to build reliable applications and these new tools provide another advance in reliability.”

The Unit Testing Tool provides a centralized test dashboard to manage and track all the tests run in a project. The Contract Tool makes it even easier than before to equip software elements with “contracts”, semantic guarantees of reliability.

Another major innovation is the Eiffel Information System (EIS), offering a simple way to connect Eiffel texts with external tools such as Microsoft Word. A typical application is for a Word document describing the requirements for a system, to include an EIS link; clicking the link will open the right class or routine in the EiffelStudio IDE. Conversely, Eiffel text can link to a paragraph of a Word document, HTML page or other non-Eiffel document. This makes it possible to keep close connections between Eiffel systems and the relevant external documents. For example:

• If user requirements change, EIS will help find out immediately what parts of the software may be affected and have to be updated.
• If a developer starts working on a class or routine, he or she may know immediately which user requirements are involved.

EIS reinforces the role of EiffelStudio as a full-lifecycle solution, covering the entire system development process seamlessly from analysis down to design, implementation and maintenance.

Another Eiffel first is the notion of “attached type” which guarantees that no void calls will occur at run time. Void calls, also known as null pointer dereferencing, are risks of run-time crashes affecting programs written in all mainstream programming languages. With version 6.2 EiffelStudio is the first mainstream IDE to offer the possibility of removing such cases at compile time, a critical improvement to the reliability of systems.

Other 6.2 features include:

• Treatment of exceptions as objects, a gain of expressiveness for programmers.
• A new equality operator, ~, providing a safer and simpler form of object comparison.
• More support for Eiffel’s self-documentation principle through a new “note” keyword.
• More tools for execution monitoring, to help programmers fine-tune optimal run-time performance.
• Numerous improvements to the EiffelStudio tool suite

Details on these and many other new features of EiffelStudio 6.2 are listed at:
http://docs.eiffel.com/eiffelstudio/tools/eiffelstudio/reference/02_what_s_new/Eiffel62.html

EiffelStudio 6.2 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 the Eiffel Information System, increasing EiffelStudio’s connections to other tools such as Word. This is part of our commitment to support our customers in their day-to-day environment”

EiffelStudio is based on the widely acclaimed Eiffel programming language, recipient of the most extensive implementation of object-oriented concepts, standardized through ECMA and the ISO. 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. EiffelStudio is used by developers and 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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