IBM Rational Software Architect - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

IBM Rational Software Architect, (RSA) made by IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's Rational Software

Rational Software

Rational Machines was founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development...

division, is a comprehensive modeling and development environment that uses the Unified Modeling Language

Unified Modeling Language

Unified Modeling Language is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering. The standard is managed, and was created, by the Object Management Group...

(UML) for designing architecture for C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

and Java 2 Enterprise Edition

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE is widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java platform differs from the Java Standard Edition Platform in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier...

(J2EE) applications and web services. Rational Software Architect is built on the Eclipse

Eclipse (software)

Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...

open-source software framework

Software framework

In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed by user code, thus providing application specific software...

and includes capabilities focused on architectural code analysis, C++, and model-driven development (MDD) with the UML for creating resilient applications and web services.

Overview

Rational Software Architect version 7.5 includes the following capabilities:

Built on Eclipse
Eclipse (software)
Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...

version 3.4
Supports UML
Unified Modeling Language
Unified Modeling Language is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering. The standard is managed, and was created, by the Object Management Group...

version 2.1
Supports model-to-code and code-to-model transformations.
1. Forward transformations go from:
  1. UML to Java
    Java (programming language)
    Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
  2. UML to C#
  3. UML to C++
    C++
    C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
  4. UML to EJB
  5. UML to WSDL
    Web Services Description Language
    The Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a Web service. A WSDL description of a web service provides a machine-readable description of how the service can be called, what parameters it expects and what data structures...
  6. UML to XSD
  7. UML to CORBA
    Çorba
    Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
    
    Interface Description Language (IDL)
  8. UML to structured query language (SQL
    SQL
    SQL is a programming language designed for managing data in relational database management systems ....
    
    )-based logical data models as supported by IBM Rational Data Architect software.
2. Reverse transformations go from
  1. Java to UML
  2. C++ to UML.
  3. .NET to UML
Includes all of the capabilities of IBM Rational Application Developer
IBM Rational Application Developer
IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software is a commercial Eclipse-based integrated development environment , made by IBM's Rational Software division, for visually designing, constructing, testing, and deploying Web services, portals, and Java Enterprise Edition ...
Enables model management for parallel development and architectural re-factoring, e.g., split, combine, compare and merge models and model fragments.
Provides visual construction tools to expedite software design and development

It also has integrations with other Rational tools, such as ClearCase

Rational ClearCase

The Rational ClearCase family consists of several software tools for supporting software configuration management of source code and other software development assets. It is developed by the Rational Software division of IBM...

version control and ClearQuest

Rational ClearQuest

Rational ClearQuest is an enterprise level workflow automation tool from the Rational Software division of IBM. Commonly, ClearQuest is configured as a bug tracking system, but it can be configured to act as a CRM tool or to track a complex manufacturing process. It can also implement these...

configuration management.

All Rational software products, including Rational Software Architect (RSA), are engineered as plugins that sit on top of the open-source Eclipse

Eclipse (software)

Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...

development platform. Installing Rational Software Architect gives the developer the option to either install RSA on top of an existing Eclipse v3.2 installation, or to install a new Eclipse v3.2 instance.

Because RSA is Eclipse-based, it can take advantage of a vibrant market of third-party plugins for Eclipse, as well as plugins specifically for Rational tools.

History

IBM Rational software

Rational Software

has a long history in application modeling, beginning in the early 1990s with the work of Grady Booch

Grady Booch

Grady Booch is an American software engineer. Booch is best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. Grady is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments...

, James Rumbaugh

James Rumbaugh

James E. Rumbaugh is an American computer scientist and object methodologist who is best known for his work in creating the Object Modeling Technique and the Unified Modeling Language .- Biography :...

and Ivar Jacobson

Ivar Jacobson

Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson is a Swedish computer scientist, known as major contributor to UML, Objectory, RUP and aspect-oriented software development.- Biography :...

. They combined competing modeling approaches to form what eventually became the Unified Modeling Language

Unified Modeling Language

.

Rational Software's first visual modeling and development tool was Rational Rose, a stand-alone modeling tool that integrates at the application programming interface

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

(API) level with third-party Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to support a variety of programming languages and other implementation technologies.

While Rational Rose was an important step in bringing Model-driven development (MDD) closer to practicing software developers, it was found that only a small fraction of developers used modeling on a routine basis. A key problem was identified - developers didn’t like to leave their IDE. They wanted visual modeling to be integrated—not with their IDE, but rather inside their IDE.

Rational responded to this need in 2002 with IBM Rational XDE

IBM Rational Rose XDE

Rational Rose XDE, an "eXtended Development Environment" for software developers, integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer...

software, providing an extended development environment for the next generation of programming technologies emerging at the time: Java and Microsoft .NET. IBM Rational XDE was characterized as the next generation of IBM Rational Rose — not a new version of it (hence the name change), and not necessarily a replacement for Rose (since IBM Rational XDE was purposefully restricted to support only a select number of IDEs and implementation technologies). However, with each addition of a tool or capability came another point-to-point integration requirement. As more and more capabilities were added, Rational began to reach the practical limits of this style of tool integration.

For the next-generation MDD products, it was only natural to build additional model-driven development functions on top of Eclipse to form a more complete MDD tool. IBM Rational Software Architect, IBM Rational Software Modeler

IBM Rational Software Modeler

IBM Rational Software Modeler was withdrawn from marketing on August 17, 2010. IBM Rational Software Modeler, made by IBM's Rational Software division, is a Unified Modeling Language 2.0-based visual modeling and design tool...

and IBM Rational Systems Developer are the result of these changes, transforming the silos that previously defined modeling, development and code analysis into an integrated and unified design and development experience. RSA now co-exists with IBM Rational Rhapsody (acquired from Telelogic

Telelogic

Telelogic AB was a software business headquartered in Malmö, Sweden. Telelogic was founded in 1983 as a research and development arm of Televerket, the Swedish department of telecom . It was later acquired by IBM Rational, and exists under the IBM software group.Telelogic had operations in 22...

in 2008) and several other products, with the two mentioned being the major MDD solutions within Rational.

Benefits

The benefits of using Rational Software Architect include:

Build software architecture that supports change with a common platform that facilitates easy roundtrip engineering and synchronization of models and code.
Accelerate implementation and facilitate maintenance of a successful service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution, such as a web service, with powerful tools and process guidance.
Use UML to ensure the numerous stakeholders within your software development projects are continuously communicating, and use defined specifications to jumpstart development.
Gain insight into distributed projects and tighter control of shared information.

IBM Rational Software Architect Versions

v7.0: Released December 2006. Based on Eclipse v3.2, UML v2.1 and IBM Rational Application Developer v7.0
v7.0.0.1: Released January 2007. Includes bug fixes.
v7.0.0.2: Released January 2007. Includes support for UML to SOA
Service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...

transformations, including Service Creation Description Language (SCDL), BPEL, WSDL and XSD.
v7.0.0.3: Released July 2007. Includes support for asynchronous web services (JAX-WS
JAX-WS
The Java API for XML Web Services is a Java programming language API for creating web services. It is part of the Java EE platform from Sun Microsystems. Like the other Java EE APIs, JAX-WS uses annotations, introduced in Java SE 5, to simplify the development and deployment of web service clients...

) and support for new Java 5.0 UML stereotypes.
v7.5.0: Released September 2008. Based on Eclipse v3.4.
v8.0: Released August 2010. Based on Eclipse v3.6.

External links

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