* A look at some of the milestones of the IBM-Rational buy
Special Focus author abednarz@nww.com takes a look at the IBM-Rational buy a year later.
With the $2.1 billion Rational purchase, IBM gained an array of tools aimed at helping companies build, integrate, modernize and deploy software resources, Bednarz writes. The breadth of tools is significant; Rational’s products cover software development throughout the application lifecycle, including design, modeling, testing, quality assurance, software configuration management and maintenance.
Since the acquisition there have been some key milestones, among them:
* Engineers from the Rational and WebSphere Studio teams have worked to create a single team that spans both organizations and is focused on a unified product plan.
* IBM has worked to make the Eclipse development platform, which IBM devised and released as open-source code in 2001, the unifying foundation for its WebSphere and Rational tools. IBM’s WebSphere development tools already were Eclipse-based, as were some of Rational’s tools. Eventually, IBM expects to officially move its WebSphere development technologies underneath the Rational brand to consolidate its application development assets.
* A key product focus of has been building Rational Rapid Developer (RRD), a development environment for building J2EE applications. First released by IBM in May, RRD is based on a product called NeuArchitect, which was created by NeuVis – a company Rational bought just prior to being acquired by IBM. IBM and Rational engineers have worked together to repackage the NeuArchitect technology, which provides a single environment for designing, integrating, constructing and deploying Web, wireless and portal-based business applications. The appeal of RRD is that it can automatically construct Java code, masking the complexity and allowing users to focus their development efforts on business requirements rather than infrastructure coding.
These are a few of the key goings-on. For more, see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/1124specialfocus.html
