Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing for IBM Rational, shares his insights about how Rational will affect WebSphere. And, Eric gives you a look at the new Rational products and enhancements geared toward making WebSphere development easier.

Advisor: What does having Rational as a part of IBM mean to WebSphere?

Schurr: Rational is IBM's software development platform for its "on demand" strategy. So, if you look at the various software brands in general terms, Rational is the "build" brand, WebSphere and DB2 are "run" brands, and Tivoli is a "manage" brand. Lotus is the collaboration that spans all the brands.

For WebSphere developers, this means a more complete, integrated solution with fewer points of contact so you have more simplicity in your services support. The ultimate objective is a better offering for WebSphere users because now that we're part of IBM, we can optimize our use of resources. Of course, we can share any information with each other to make sure the products integrate well. We've been working with the WebSphere team for years, but now you can already see the plans and creativity around integrating the products accelerating.

Advisor: Tell us what Rational has in store for developers.

Schurr: We're releasing some new products and enhancements to our current product line, which fall into three main categories: rapid application development, extended development, and delivering a more configurable development process.

Rapid application development

IBM Rational Rapid Developer lets organizations with a wide variety of developers easily create n-tier applications. Some of these developers might have detailed J2EE expertise, but more importantly, many don't. Analysts say there are currently 1.5 million Java developers worldwide, but the next generation of Java developers will primarily be people who aren't J2EE experts. For those people to be successful, they need technology to help them build applications on J2EE without having to deal with the intricacies of J2EE.

Advisor: Can you explain the concept of "architected RAD"?

Schurr: "Architected" indicates a model-based product, which means you've employed elements of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to create a model. By doing that, you ensure the application is reliable and scalable. The RAD applications of the 1990s were built quickly, but they weren't necessarily built well, and users suffered for that. IBM Rational Rapid Developer lets you use RAD techniques to build applications quickly, but because they're built on an architected foundation, the applications are also reliable, scalable, and manageable.

To make integration with legacy applications easier, you can connect Rational Rapid Developer to a variety of existing databases and legacy applications to integrate and extend current applications. Today, more than ever, organizations are trying to exploit and leverage what they've done in house when they're trying to create new things.

Advisor: By the end of the year, IBM says it will be incorporating more RAD features into the WebSphere family. Is IBM Rational Rapid Developer a move towards that?

Schurr: It's related; there's a general push throughout IBM to give users more RAD features. Rational Rapid Developer is a sister product to WebSphere Studio and is meant for people who aren't J2EE experts. You can use both Rational Rapid Developer and WebSphere Studio on a project. In a development team of 10 people, for example, you might only have two or three people who are architects or J2EE experts. They would use WebSphere Studio and Rational XDE, then compliment that work with people using Rational Rapid Developer to build other parts of the application.

Extended development

To show IBM's commitment to developers, it renamed the Rational XDE plug-in for WebSphere Studio and Eclipse to Rational XDE Developer. Rational XDE Developer runs inside WebSphere Studio 5, Eclipse 2, and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. To extend the development capabilities, we've integrated Rational Purify Plus into Rational XDE. Purify Plus is a combination of technologies that includes memory management, runtime analysis, code coverage, and other tools you can use to optimize your code. These features have been blended into Rational XDE inside WebSphere Studio to help you tackle those difficult debugging problems. You can also exploit UML models to perform visual trace and debug activities, and Rational XDE Developer builds the UML models for you.

There's also a new product for Java testers: Rational XDE Tester. It's an automated Java and Web application testing product and runs as an add-in to WebSphere Studio 5 and Eclipse 2.

Development process

Over the past few years, Rational has rebuilt Rational Unified Process (RUP) into a componentized architecture, so you can add and remove components based on your organization's needs.
Developers are drawn to RUP because they like the idea of having a common foundation, terminology, and work definitions for how to do software development. They also recognize that every project and organization is different. Organizations are faced with the challenge of how to implement something that's common for the whole organization, yet optimized for a particular project. Rational has enhanced RUP so organizations can configure it at multiple levels -- according to the organization, project, and individual user.

Advisor: What are the configuration features for each level?

Schurr: At the organizational level, we've made enhancements [that improve] the ability of an organization to reconstruct the process at the foundational level so it can create one process foundation for the entire organization. You can take RUP, get right into the nuts and bolts of it, and customize it.

Because each project is different, RUP now includes an enhanced component called RUP Builder that lets you configure RUP and add plug-ins. Plug-ins are modules you build to add content to RUP, and there are now 30 or so plug-ins available. To get more information about the available plug-ins, go to http://www.rational.com.

When you get to the level of the individual developer on a project, certain developers only have to worry about certain aspects of RUP. We've added a new facility called MyRUP, which lets you configure RUP to your particular view. This personalization lets you focus your view of RUP in a way that fits your particular role; you can't change or delete content.

More

Rational is adding a variety of other enhancements to its line of products. For example, Rational ClearCase now has enhanced team development support and tighter integration with WebSphere Application Server 5. Rational says it has also made it easier to install, administer, and deploy the suite of Rational products. Other improvements include new reports and abilities in the Rational Project Console, Rational's automated project management system.

For more information about Rational's products, go to http://www.rational.com.