Released on: June 13, 2008, 4:45 pm

Press Release Author: Eiffel Software

Industry: Software

Press Release Summary: EiffelStudio 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.

Press Release Body: Santa Barbara, CA, June 16, 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.

"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.

About Eiffel Software

Eiffel software, http://www.eiffel.com, was founded in 1985 with the mission of
developing compilers and tools based on the power of pure object-oriented concepts
to improve programmers\' productivity, lifecycle efficiency and quality of the
resulting applications. For over twenty years Eiffel Software has offered the most
cost-effective and advanced development tools on a large variety of platforms.
Thanks to the power of the language and the tools of the environment, Eiffel users
continuously demonstrate that they can produce 2 to10 times as much software in the
same amount of time as can be achieved using other IDEs and toolsets. Please contact
us for more information.
Product or company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.


Web Site: http://www.eiffel.com

Contact Details: Caroline Madison
Eiffel Software
5949 Hollister Avenue
Santa Barbara, CA 93117
email: caroline@eiffel.com