Rational is today expected to announce model-based rapid application development (RAD) for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), a rebranded XDE product offering potential for code-reuse, and alterations to the company’s Unified Process (RUP).

The products are Rational’s first since completion of last year’s $2.1bn acquisition by IBM Corp. Rational vice president of marketing for Rational’s products Eric Schurr said this first set of updates strengthened IBM’s software development platform.

IBM said earlier this year its mission is to become the biggest tools vendor in the world. IBM has not defined in what sense it wishes to become the world’s biggest tools vendor.

However, the companies hope to enhance their developers’ experience, ensuring individuals stay loyal to loyal to their offerings, by giving programmers a one-stop-shop for a family of features increasingly called Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

ALM is a strategy also employed by Borland, who last year bought Rational’s application design and modeling rival TogetherSoft Corp. Borland is also the industry’s number-one Java integrated development environment (IDE) vendor and stands in IBM’s way to becoming the biggest selling Java tools company.

Modeling of applications is regarded as a first step in ALM, and Rational will today announce Rapid Developer, which gives a Model Driven Architecture-based approach to building J2EE applications.

Rational claimed Rapid Developer brings an architechted approach to Rapid Application Development (RAD), a concept largely pioneered by Borland for Windows.

Schurr said Developer could generate the majority of code via MDA for a J2EE application. He claimed Developer brings a framework to RAD, which has until now allowed programmers to build rapid but poorly-architechted applications.

Developer uses software acquired by Rational from NeuVis Technology last year and integrates with Rational’s ClearCase, XDE and RUP, IBM’s WebSphere Studio and Application Server, and DB2, and can deploy to BEA Systems Inc’s application server and Oracle Corp’s database.

XDE Professional, Rational’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) environment, has been refined and retargeted at developers. Now XDE Developer, the product features visual trace debugging, auto generation of a UML model and the ability to search for, and re-use, existing assets such as models or templates.

XDE Developer provides re-use through support for the Re-usable Asset Specification and is available for WebSphere Studio 5.0, the second version of the IBM-backed Eclipse framework and Microsoft Corp’s Visual Studio.NET IDE.

Rational has also updated RUP, making the process more configurable to support different levels of IT needs – organizational, project-level and personal-level. Developers can set a UML framework at the organizational level, use plug-ins to build at the project-level while at the personal level developers are unable to modify content.

Source: Computerwire