Integration efforts were still a work in progress as IBM
marked the one-year anniversary of its acquisition of Rational
Software last week. But the company has showed signs that it is
making headway.
Its consolidated developerWorks website, launched last week,
will give the Rational pages the same look and feel as those
displaying content for IBM's other software product lines.
IBM intends to expand its developer outreach programmes next
year by increasing the number of technical events it stages from
120 last year to 400 next year, said Buell Duncan, general manager
of developer relations at IBM.
Duncan also said Rational's user conference will be folded into
IBM's developerWorks Live conference next year "because Rational is
the lead inside of IBM for the efforts as we drive this IBM
software development platform."
Executives outlined how the company will continue its long-term
effort to move to a common architecture across all of IBM's
software products, including the Rational development tools. To
that end, IBM is using its Eclipse open-source development
framework to give developers a common interface for its tools.
"We were a business partner with IBM for many years before
joining IBM, so we had already made considerable progress
integrating our products," said Mike Devlin, the former chief
executive officer of Rational and now general manager of IBM's
Rational software business unit. "But now we're really accelerating
that."
The merger is working out well for customers such as John
Pritchard, a software architect at Lockheed Martin's Integrated
Systems and Solutions unit. Lockheed is an IBM hardware customer,
and Pritchard's group uses IBM's WebSphere application server and
integrated development environment, as well as Rational modeling
and testing tools.
Pritchard said that in the past, the group had to go through the
integration process to get the code generated by Rational's Rose
modeling tool imported into the WebSphere Studio Application
Developer.
"Now they're doing that, and it allows us to focus on developing
a system," he said, adding that the next step will be to move to
the newer Rational XDE modelling tool, which is more tightly
integrated with WebSphere Studio.
One window
Now that Rational's Purify testing tools are integrated into
WebSphere Studio, developers no longer have to export files from
Studio to Purify and close down one tool to work in the other,
Pritchard added. Instead, they can work with a single window
open.
"I think these are things we would probably have seen anyway,
but they just come out faster now," he said. "You'll see an IBM
update of a product, and they've got a bunch of Rational
integrations with that."
Pritchard added that he would also like developers, testers and
product managers who use different IBM and Rational tools to be
able to look at a common interface when they work. He said that
Eclipse is geared toward developers and has added modelling.
Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing in the Rational
division, said the company not only will continue to work on
integrating products that cannot share a common user interface at
present, but it will also tighten integration among products that
have already been integrated through the Eclipse framework.
Schurr said WebSphere Studio Application Developer features a
Unified Modelling Language visualiser that was built jointly by the
WebSphere and Rational teams, adding that Rational's XDE modeling
tool will be more tightly integrated in the future.
The same is true of IBM's Tivoli performance monitoring tool. So
far, the Rational Robot automated testing playback technology has
been integrated, he noted.
The Rational Unified Process (RUP), a set of best practices for
developing software, was updated to be more componentised and
customisable. Schurr said that in the future, RUP will add content
from the Summit methodology that was obtained through IBM's
acquisition of PwC Consulting last year.
But Gartner analyst Mark Driver said that although some of his
clients are seeing value from the broader range of developer
products that IBM now offers thanks to the Rational acquisition,
other users are concerned about the Rational division's support for
non-IBM products such as Microsoft's .net technologies.
Driver said he believed some users may stop using Rational tools
as Microsoft starts to offer tools that are more competitive with
Rational's development lifecycle products.
Rational executives insisted that they will continue to support
the .net development environment, Aand Devlin said he anticipated
that Rational tools eventually will let developers build
service-oriented architectures with a common set of modelling and
testing tools, even if some services are .net-based and others are
J2EE-based.
IBM to release WebSphere updates
This week IBM intends to release an update to its WebSphere
application server that adds support for some of the latest Java
technologies and for a proposed standard to ease the building of
user interfaces for web applications.
WebSphere Application Server 5.1 will include support for Java 2
Standard Edition 1.4.1 - also known as Java Development Kit (JDK)
1.4 - and improvements in the areas of security, XML and debugging,
said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of WebSphere integration
software.
Sutor said the latest version will also add beta support for
JavaServer Faces, a proposed standard being developed through the
Java Community Process, an organisation that Sun Microsystems
established to evolve Java technology. Using the programming model
that JavaServer Faces defines, developers can assemble reusable
interface components in a web page and connect them to data
sources.
"It makes it much, much easier to deploy very rich applications
yet still have them server-based," said Sutor, adding that the
JavaServer Faces standard is expected to be finalised next quarter
and that he did not anticipate substantial changes.
On 30 December, IBM will release an update to the accompanying
WebSphere Studio Application Developer tool set to support JDK 1.4
and JavaServer Faces. Sutor said the 5.1.1 release will give
developers a pallet of controls that they can drag and drop, and
the means to make easy connections to databases.
In the new application server and tool releases, IBM will also
provide early support for Service Data Objects, a specification
that describes a simple, unified programming model for data access
to heterogeneous systems.
IBM and rival BEA Systems submitted the proposal to the Java
Community Process earlier this month. The result of a vote to
determine whether the specification has been accepted is due later
today.
Sutor last week disclosed the road map for the next major
release of WebSphere. He said IBM expects to start delivering
Version 6.0 in the second half of next year. That release will
feature support for J2EE 1.4 and performance and usability
improvements.
Carol Sliwa writes for Computerworld