EA vs Borland Together

[Roggan]

Can anyone shed some light over the differences between Borland Together and EA?

from the little ive seen of BT , it seems to be focused purely on the coding aspect and nothing on the rest.

so , please give some info on what BT does better than EA and vice versa.

//Roger

[AlexG]

Hi Roggan!

A few days ago I installed the Borland Togther Designer Trial Edition. There did have been two really great features:
* A syntax checker for OCL expressions (because I havn't greaty experiences with OCL, I can't rate the quality of it's checks...)
* A graphical model comparison to find the differences of two or three models

The main disadvantage of BT are its system requirements.

EA is much faster - because it is not written in java

A greate feature of EA are it's supported action semantics - you can explicitly model a CallBehaviorAction, CallOperationAction and other special actions. When EA starts to support an xmi export which is aligned to the uml2 metamodel, then it will be a VERY nice tool.

Regards,

Alex

[Kevin Brennan]

I'll throw in a couple more.

EA is much better at documenting and generating reports regarding the model, which makes a big difference if the whole team isn't using it. In particular, it's a lot better at managing requirements.

EA can model things outside UML, such as the UI.

[psides]

One advantage of Together - it supports JBuilder.  We are waiting for EA to support Java as it does .net.

[Gabor]

BT can generate sequence diagram from code (a very cool feature for documenting existing apps).
Also can switch communication diagram to sequence diagram and vice versa.

Disadvantage, that works only in the VS IDE with the price similar to EA. As stand alone application is far more expensive.

[Gabor]

A supplement to the above messagge, that Together can reverse engineering to sequence diagram only the C# code yet  

[angel-o-sphere]

Na,

Together REs also Java code to sequence diagrams.

Well, frankly: Together is THE BEST case system. But I don't know about all the different versions (some include metrics, some other special features).

Unfortunatly Together is VERY EXPENSIVE and further more, its a DEAD product.

After Borland bought Together it fired a big deal of the developers and a big deal of the management staff.

For about 2 years Borland ignored that they own Together now. Sales dropped to nearly zero. This reinforced the impression (at Borlands side) that Together does not sell. So they dropped all further development, and by that they got the remaining majority of the developers to leave or get fired as well. As far as I know the development team is now less than ten people.

The only developments currently done are integrations into various IDEs.

When I downloaded Together at the beginning of this year they did not even send me an evaluation key, I had to mail a friend who is working (my information source) by Borland.

angel'o'sphere

[angel-o-sphere]

OOPS ... while Together is IMHO the best case system, EA is the second best

Definitly EA is the best Windows only CASE System and beats tools like Rational Rose and Innovator. (But both have individual strengthes which might be utilized in a certain project).

If you want a tool similar to Together (e.g. all platform, written in java, scriptable in Java) look at MagicDraw from www.nomagic.com. Use my email as refferee: [email protected], you probably get a discount then.

angel'o'sphere

[AlexG]

@angel-o-sphere: Did they really fire most of their developers?? The new Together Designer 2005 works quite nice and doesn't really look, as if there are only ten guys working on it...

Alex