Big Blue Tuesday drew the curtain on its first software products from its
purchase of Rational Software — two new tools geared to
help development teams write business applications and systems together.
Both tools are geared for software automation, an increasingly important
ingredient to helping enterprises meet their software needs on-demand, a
business model IBM is betting its existence on.
Armonk, N.Y.’s IBM moved
to purchase Rational Software last
December and has been quietly integrating its extensive product suites
into its repertoire ever since. Before it was acquired, Rational was one of
the last few major independent software vendors left and competed with Borland Software.
Analysts scrutinized the deal, speculating what effects the purchase would have on the
software market, particularly with regard to Microsoft and the opposing Java
supporters, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.
Tuesday’s news gives the software world a peek at what IBM has been up to
with Rational: IBM Rational Rapid Developer, an architected application
development (ARAD) environment that makes it easier for software developers
to build Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) business applications and IBM
Rational XDE Tester, with enhancements to IBM Rational XDE Developer.
The former tool offers Java developers a visual modeling development
environment that automates code development, making J2EE application
building easier and more efficient. Visualization modeling, according to
many analysts, is becoming more and more important as software development
gets more challenging and complex. IBM said these will make it easier to
build “standards-based applications that can scale to help meet the needs of
the organization.”
The latter tool, Rational XDE Tester, is test automation software that makes
sure Java clients and Web-based applications are running smoothly. It is
based on the Eclipse project and runs
inside IBM WebSphere Studio 5.0 and Eclipse 2.0.
Also, IBM Rational XDE Developer Plus, formerly Rational XDE Professional
Plus, now has a debugging capability called “visual trace” that displays
application runtime errors and creates associated unified modeling language
(UML) models. This integrates with Rational PurifyPlus and allows developers
to work in supported versions of Java, Visual C# and Visual Basic .NET.
IBM’s work with Rational XDE is part of a broader endeavor to fuse the IBM
Rational XDE product family into IBM WebSphere Studio, Eclipse and Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET. The goal is to bring design and testing closer together
to encourage developers to model, develop and test applications in the same
independent development environment to minimize errors and find bugs.
U.S. pricing for the new products, widely available in June, is as follows:
IBM Rational Rapid Developer v2003 is $5,995 per user license, IBM Rational
XDE Tester v2003 is $2,995 per user license, IBM Rational XDE Developer
v2003 is $2,995 per user license, IBM Rational XDE Developer Plus is $4,195
per user license and versions of IBM Rational Suite v2003 start at $3,995
per node-locked license.
Prices for countries other than the United States will vary due to shipping
and delivery costs, custom clearance costs, translations, and other factors.
