Eiffel Software announced the release of EiffelStudio 21.11, the latest version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE). EiffelStudio, is a comprehensive suite of tools enabling programmers to easily and cost-effectively produce correct, reliable, and maintainable software systems.
The two major innovations of release 21.11 are built-in configuration management and full support for the newest user interface (UI) style, in particular on Mac platforms.
Configuration management (CM) tools enable project teams to keep track of the evolution of their software, and reconcile changes made by different developers, often widely distributed geographically. Proper configuration management is an essential condition of healthy software development. In most environments today, developers perform configuration management using special tools outside of the IDE. This scheme complicates development and bears the risk of costly CM mistakes, causing wasted time and introducing bugs. EiffelStudio 21.11 brings CM into the EiffelStudio development environment, enabling developers to perform the key steps of “pull” (importing other developer’s changes) and “push” (contributing their own changes to the shared repository) at the push of a few buttons, without leaving the IDE. In the words of Jocelyn Fiat, the principal developer of the built-in EiffelStudio CM, “this ability to perform configuration management tasks from within EiffelStudio is a major step forward for developers, enabling them to concentrate on the difficult tasks of programming advanced applications rather than repetitive and error-prone management tasks”. EiffelStudio’s CM tool enables each team to use its chosen CM solution, including the industry-leading Git and Subversion, without having to worry about the details.
Another major advance of the version is extended support for modern user interfaces, particularly the Mac OS platforms., through support for the GTK 3 graphical user interface (UI). According to Bertrand Meyer, founder and CTO of Eiffel Software, “Unix and Linux continue to offer programmers a solid platform for their development and MAC OS is more and more a platform of choice for developers. For this community it was time for Eiffel Software to migrate to GTK3”. Eiffel was designed to allow programmers to capitalize on new trends and to apply their creativity to innovative developments on all platforms. EiffelStudio 21.11 is a particularly welcome advance for Eiffel programmers, giving them an edge on non-Windows platforms.
In addition to these major extensions, EiffelStudio 21.11 continues to increase its general functionalities, with the introduction of a unified syntax to access loop cursor features inside an iteration form of a loop for both keyword-based and Unicode-based loop variants and the addition of a source control management tool, supporting basic usage of Subversion and Git commands, bug corrections and a variety of other improvements.
To learn more about what’s new, see the EiffelStudio 21.11 release notes. To try it yourself, download EiffelStudio from https://www.eiffel.com/eiffelstudio/product/.
EiffelStudio is based on the Eiffel programming language, the most extensive implementation of modern object-oriented technology, standardized through ECMA and the International Standards Organization. Its core concepts, native only to Eiffel, such as Design by Contract™, seamless development, automatic testing, void safety, parallel programming, and modelling facilities allow developers to write predictable and controllable applications that are easy to maintain.
EiffelStudio received the prestigious ACM Software Systems Award and is used by developers and design-team leaders in challenging enterprise environments in all areas of software development such as finance, health, defense, telecom and others. Applications built with EiffelStudio run flawlessly 24×7, 365 days a year.
