IBM Corp. and Rational Software Corp. Monday announced a strategic alliance to jointly develop and market software to help customers accelerate the development and deployment of e-business applications.

The alliance provides new integration between e-business software that is based on open industry standards such as XML and Java. IBM and Rational hope to provide support for the application development process to provide business process modeling, business requirements definition, visual modeling, code generation, configuration management, defect tracking, testing, deployment and systems management.

IBM and Rational are attempting to more closely integrate Rational Suite with software from the IBM Application Framework for e-business. One new integration is a standards-based XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) bridge between IBM's VisualAge* for Java and Rational Rose, a product in Rational Suite. This enables round-trip engineering between VisualAge for Java and Rational Rose, providing generation of Java code from models and models from Java. The integration is delivered as an add-in to VisualAge for Java and will be available for download on June 30, from IBM's VisualAge Developer resource site.

IBM's Application Framework is based on an open, multiplatform and multivendor environment. Standards like Java, Enterprise JavaBeans, CORBA, and XML simplify application development. The framework allows developers to write applications on their platform of choice and then deploy them throughout a multiplatform network without rewriting code.

The application framework for e-business also enables Rational to integrate and exploit IBM's family of servers including RS/6000, AS/400, S/390 and Netfinity. Rational Suite provides integrated solutions optimized for the key roles on software teams -- analysts, developers and testers. Rational Suite provides requirements management, visual modeling, automated testing, performance testing, change request management and documentation automation.

More information is available here.