Eiffel Software Announces Beta Release of EiffelStudio for Macintosh OS X

Eiffel Software offers full IDE as a free download during beta phase

Eiffel Software announces the beta release of the latest version of its award-winning development environment, EiffelStudio, for the Macintosh OS X platform. Available now for the first time on the Macintosh platform, the company is offering the long-awaited version EiffelStudio for the Mac as a free download.

For years, the choices for Mac developers have been very limited, and there has been tremendous interest in having a fully object-oriented development system available for the Macintosh platform," said Chris Ambarian, VP of Sales and Marketing at Eiffel Software. This is a fully functional version of EiffelStudio that works on the Mac. We still have a little bit of work to be done on native look-and-feel aspects, but we think it is hands-down the most sophisticated development environment available for the Mac platform. For a limited time were offering it for free. Were looking to the market to give us feedback to guide final development and ensure that it has everything that the Mac developers want."

EiffelStudio is based on the highly-regarded object-oriented programming language, Eiffel. Case studies have shown that because of the efficiency of the language and the powerful tools in the environment, EiffelStudios users are demonstrating that compared to using other popular languages and toolsets: 1) they can produce as much as 10 times the usable software in the same amount of time, and 2) the quality of the resulting software is higher.

Eiffel has thus gained prominence in recent years among developers and design team leaders in challenging enterprise environments, as well as among independent development teams who create high-quality reusable applications for smaller- to medium- sized companies.

The OS X version of EiffelStudio adds to the already wide range of operating systems for which EiffelStudio is available (which includes Windows, Linux, Unix, VMS and embedded systems). This means that a team can build entire applications (including bulletproof business logic and sophisticated GUIs) that will run identically on any platform for which EiffelStudio is available.

EiffelStudios openness makes it a great way to create robust, reusable objects and libraries that can run identically on a wide variety of platforms. Its Design by Contract feature makes it especially easy to create code that developers can safely, reliably use to create business-critical applications, and EiffelBuild allows them to create rich, portable GUIs that dont have to be rewritten either," says Ambarian.

With EiffelStudios combination of portability and reuse, plus robustness- and productivity-related features, you have a tool that drastically cuts development time. Most of our customers report up to 80% time savings over other well-known languages and tools."

Features of EiffelStudio 5.3 include:
An easy-to-learn, plain-English syntax
·   An extremely powerful object model that includes Design by Contract, multiple inheritance, and genericity
·   A complete framework for producing software applications that includes a graphic modeling tool that is integrated with the implementation (code) view for seamless roundtrip engineering, and a multi-platform GUI builder that generates Eiffel code
·   Complete portability on several different platforms (various Windows, Unix, Linux, PPC, VMS, embedded systems, and even Mac OS X and .NET)

According to Eiffel Software, the Eiffel language is syntactically among the easiest to learn of all programming languages. Passive support for users new to the language is available from the company website, where there are also links to Eiffel user groups. Onsite training and consulting are also available from the company by inquiring at sales@eiffel.com. The OS X beta version of EiffelStudio 5.3 is available as a free download at www.eiffel.com/downloads/.

The new release of EiffelStudio 5.3 on other platforms has already begun shipping to Eiffel Softwares existing customers, and is available for purchase via the companys website, www.eiffel.com.
Eiffel Software (a division of ISE) is the world leader in Eiffel true object-oriented programming tools. Founded in 1985, Eiffel Software produces proven professional tools and component libraries for business-critical and enterprise software developments. Eiffel Softwares products enable their customers to output more and higher-quality software in less time than with any other development tools available. Its users span the globe, in industries ranging from large financial institutions, to technology manufacturing, to government and defense contractors, to health care providers and more.
For more information about Eiffel Studio, contact Eiffel Software at 356 Storke Road; Goleta, California 93117; (805) 685-1006; sales@eiffel.com; or visit www.eiffel.com.