A new brand of SALSA is set to enter the market in the next three to six months: Sun Appliance for Live Software Analysis, designed to help Sun Professional ServicesSM staff assist clients in analyzing and editing JavaTM programming language code designs and architectures.

SALSA, as eWeek's Darryl K. Taft points out, is not really a hardware appliance but software itself, built on top of Jackpot, one of James Gosling's creations written to automate software analysis.

SALSA is a collaborative effort by Sun Professional Services, Sun Labs and the Sun tools group. Its design involved extending Jackpot to produce what John Crupi, a Sun distinguished engineer and chief architect at Sun Professional Services, calls "design analysis facts," using two-dimensional and three-dimensional visualizations.

"We look at documentation, we interview developers, we talk to architects and then eventually we're deep into the code trying to create a mental visualization of what the design is of the system," Crupi explained.

Another feature of SALSA that will assist with that effort is Pattern Query Language (PQL) or "Pickle," which helps developers write queries that look for patterns, Crupi said.

Sun has competition in this market segment, notably Microsoft with its Visual Studio Team System, but Sun goes the competition one better by checking for design and architectural problems on the fly. As Crupi sees it, users of SALSA will increase software quality even as they move design and architectural analysis closer to the development cycle.

Crupi sees big savings in time and effort when Sun Professional Services architects assess a customer's code design and architecture, a task that used to require 90 percent of the architect's time while the tool performed the remaining 10 percent. He sees the balance shifting to 70 percent tool, 30 percent architect.

Plans call for SALSA to be marketed initially as a service in a box that could be run daily to monitor systems and that Sun Professional Services architects could also monitor remotely.

Ultimately, Crupi said, SALSA will be sold in terms of partnerships to customers that have enough of the knowledge base to actually start building a knowledge base themselves.

The market for organizations that operate offshore will also find SALSA useful in determining whether the code that gets implemented is actually the code and architecture that were designed. [...read more...]

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