Teamprise Java SDK to work with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
By Jack Vaughan
Tool-maker Teamprise has begun work on a Java SDK for use with the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The pairing may seem odd, but it is not odd to a slew of enterprise development shops that support both Java and .NET. Managers at such shops would like to see their developers able to check software in and out of a common repository.
Both big shops and third-party software vendors are interested in using libraries developed by Teamprise in order to link existing Java products with Team Foundation Server data, said Teamprise’s Scott Boesch, marketing manager.
The Java SDK, scheduled to be available by end of year, builds on Teamprise’s Client Suite cross-platform applications. For many organizations, this software has found favor, as Client Suite allows Team Foundation access from within the Eclipse IDE.
“There is a lot of demand for Eclipse plug-ins, especially in big organizations,” said Boesch.
In effect, the new product will open up a large set of core libraries to expose functionality to Java developers “in the form of an API they can use to build their own Team Foundation Server-enabled applications,” said Shaw Terwilliger, software developer and project lead for the Java SDK product, in a company release.
“Microsoft already provides an API to Team Foundation Server for .NET Framework developers, so we see this product as a way to complement that offering and extend it to Java developers,” said Terwilliger. The interface is based on SOAP Web services.
In effect, the developers’ kit acts as a data access layer. The Teamprise SDK is a set of Java libraries that will allow any Java application to access Team Foundation Server, said Teamprise’s Boesch. In the first release, TFS support will primarily center on source control and work items. Boesch said Microsoft uses a similar client-side object model with TFS, but that requires a running .NET Framework.
Microsoft uses the SOAP protocol to send things in and out of the server. That is what Teamprise uses too, said Boesch.
Announcements like Teamprise’s are infrequent but welcome, just a few years into the Visual Studio Team System era. When the Microsoft product was originally released, indications were that a fair amount of Team System support from outside of Microsoft was in the offing. But Compuware alone among early Team System life-cycle tools partners has remained prominent through the intervening years.
Thus, Teamprise’s latest move is notable. If a few more company’s found their way to creating similar products, we might actually have a trend!
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