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.