A precursor of TBK was used to build
the HOOD toolset used on the Euro?¬?ghter project, and ToolBuilder was also used to
build the Kennedy-Carter I-OOA Shlaer-Mellor toolset. The latter took 12 months to
build; the number of developers involved is not revealed.
According to one of the main ?¬?gures behind ToolBuilder (Alderson, 1997), a major
factor leading to IPSYS??™s eventual business failure was a lack of in-house expertise in
the popular modeling languages of the time. This led to a series of projects where
IPSYS would give a customer one of its developers in a project to create support for a
newmodeling language. The customer would normally receive free use of the resulting
tool, and IPSYS would try to sell it to others. Sadly, in no case did this work as planned:
either customers were not suf?¬?ciently invested in the modeling language, or IPSYS
lacked the experience necessary to market and sell a tool for what was to them an
unfamiliar modeling language. The remains of IPSYS were bought by Lincoln
Software in 1995,whowere in turn bought by PeerLogic in 1999, whothemselves were
bought by Critical Path the next year. ToolBuilder disappeared along theway, although
there was a project to include part of the ToolBuilder-built Engineer product into
IBM??™s WebSphere, to provide a web front end to CICS transaction servers.
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