Salzburg, Austria-based TakeFive Software GmbH is repositioning its Sniff+ Unix development environment as cross-system, having added Windows NT and 95 support in release 2.3. The user interface and the project management of Sniff+ 2.3 is said to follow the same approach on different operating systems, enabling migrations from Unix to Windows and vice versa. TakeFive claims that the advantages of Sniff+ for Unix developers – its scalability, code comprehension and browsing, productivity and team development support – are now available to Windows programmers. All parsers in Sniff+’s core are said to extract detailed symbol and cross reference information from distributed software projects. Any tool within Sniff+ accesses this information, which is provided on-the-fly. The parsers – for Java, C/C++ and Fortran – are based on Sniff+’s so-called Fuzzy Parser technology (CI No 3,066) and are fault tolerant according to the company, providing support for integrating software components into applications or porting projects between environments, systems and programming languages. Sniff+ is also claimed to be the only object-oriented development environment that gives programmers the freedom of choice to use, mix and adapt operating systems, compiler, debugger and configuration management systems as needed. The company claims that until now, software developers have needed different tools for Unix and Windows projects. TakeFive Software was founded in 1992 and became an independent subsidiary of Integrated Systems Inc, Santa Clara, California in October 1995.
