Compuware adds tools for the app life cycle

Computerworld - Compuware Corp. yesterday continued the march to spread its product portfolio across the application life cycle by unveiling new versions of its development and testing tools and a new offering for managing performance.
To more closely link disciplines such as development, testing and operations, Detroit-based Compuware released new versions of its OptimalJ development tool and its DevPartner Java Edition debugging and analysis offering. In addition, Compuware unveiled Vantage Analyzer for J2EE for managing Java application performance.
"Java is evolving so fast that companies can't necessarily hire brilliant experts in every category all the time," said John Williams, director of strategic initiatives at Compuware. "No longer can we afford to silo the disciplines and deliver tools as though they existed in a vacuum."
For example, Vantage Analyzer is designed to boost visibility into J2EE application servers and identify bottlenecks from the applications through to the back-end infrastructure, Williams said. IT workers can use Vantage dashboards to measure end-user response times and give information about performance slowdowns to developers, he added.
Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Co. in West Des Moines, Iowa, has tested a beta version of Vantage Analyzer to correlate end-user performance in a Java-based property and casualty application to problems on its mainframe, said Matt Evanson, the company's team leader of enterprise monitoring solutions. "It has been very difficult to understand where -- especially on the back end -- we were seeing performance degradation," he said. "We wanted to dig deeper into WebSphere and the Java itself. Analyzer will help us understand more in depth on the middle tier as far as what calls are causing the slowdown."
OptimalJ 3.3, Compuware's upgraded tool for generating code from models, can automate the entire development of a user interface, Williams said. The new version of DevPartner Java Edition adds analytic capabilities to help Java developers collaborate with testing teams to build quality assurance into the initial development process, he added.
Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston, said the new products are part of an effort by Compuware to help companies whittle costs throughout the application life cycle. "Enterprise Java is so complex [that] the more visibility you can get into what is going on and fix problems sooner, the better it is," Gardner said.
But Gardner also noted that Compuware has yet to tackle other management requirements, such as optimizing runtime as it relates to operating systems and hardware.