Electric Cloud today launched new editions of its developer productivity tools, one that consolidates tools into a single interface, and another that adds parallel processing to software development tasks in the cloud.
Developers can consolidate multiple tools into a single interface using ElectricCommander 3.5, Electric Cloud’s tool for automating and managing the build-test-deploy process.
ElectricCommander 3.5 introduces an extensible UI architecture that allows developers to extend and replace functionality, said Mike Maciag, CEO of Electric Cloud. Developers can also attach data to any object in the system, to run existing back-end tools.
A wireless provider has used ElectricCommander to centralize its homegrown packaging tools for cellular phones into a unified Web-based interface. The customer rebuilt the interface of those tools as plug-ins for ElectricCommander, said Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud.
Further, different users are given different views while the workflow of the tools remains the same, said Maciag. “We don’t force people to change the way that they work.”
The company is, however, changing the way that development tools perform on cloud services. ElectricAccelerator 5.0 now includes a feature that adds parallel processing to software production tasks in addition to a new tool designed to help developers avoid unnecessary builds.
It works by running development tools and tasks in parallel against a cluster in private or public clouds. “As far as the process is concerned, it is running on the client file system,” Wallgren explained.
Consequently, the processing speed of Ant, Make, NMAKE and Visual Studio builds is increased by 10 to 20 times as compared to standalone desktop hardware, the company claims. The release also added support for MSBuild, SCons and homegrown systems.
Developers may use ElectricAccelerator’s integrated compute cloud to apply parallel computing to tasks, including parallel testing (for testing upgrade installations) or data modeling. It may be used at their desktop, in a private cloud or on a dedicated server, according to the company.
Even an Event-Driven Architecture such as the Swing Java framework can be made to run parallel in a private cloud, Wallgren added.
A sub-build technology is included to reduce unnecessary work. It identifies and builds components that are essential to the developer’s current focus, allowing the developer to compile and test more frequently without affecting the rest of the team, the company said.
The company said that the new versions of both products are available for free to existing customers, and no changes have been made to its pricing overall.
Both ElectricAccelerator and ElectricCommander operate in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud environment.
