IBM's Rational Software Unit Girds For Microsoft CompetitionIBM's Rational Software Unit Girds For Microsoft Competition

IBM's Rational Software unit says it plans to expand the ranks of Java developers and compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio tools for more enterprise developers. At its user group conference in Grapevine, Texas, Rational officials on Monday disclosed essentials of its next major upgrade of its tools, dubbed Atlantic, due before year's end. The Atlantic versions will be easier to use to build interactive Web pages. They will more thoroughly integrated with each other and tied closer to the Eclipse open-source developer's framework, said Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM Rational Software, a unit of the IBM Software Group.

"There's a sea change coming," said Duncan Buell, general manager of Rational developer relations. "Businesses are deciding their primary architecture for building software," and it's likely to be either a Java approach or a Windows-Visual Studio approach. If Java programmers continue to grow at their present rate, there will be 2.5 million Java developers sometime in 2005, Devlin said. IBM has been on the comeback trail in the tools market since 2001, as its VisualAge tools failed to gain a dominant place in the development tools market. It responded that year by making an internal developers workbench available as open-source code--the Eclipse project. Eclipse now represents one of the top three development environment used by Java programmers. IBM also launched an online resource for developers, known as developer.Works.com, and 2.2 million developers visit the site each month, Devlin said in an interview. IBM combined its Rational user group meeting with its developerWorks.com user conference as one event this year, attended by about 2,000 developers.

Microsoft is moving toward making its developer tools aimed at the heart of the enterprise. Its release Visual Studio 2005 Team System, scheduled for the first half of 2005, will offer more features for sophisticated projects and have tools for development teams that are spread over a wide geography, according to Microsoft officials. But Rational is gearing up to be a step ahead. In the Atlantic version, for example, Rational's tools will be able to store their output, such as source-code modules or test results, in its ClearQuest activity-tracking system or ClearCase version-control system.

The integration of Rational modeling and development tools with ClearCase and ClearQuest will enable the sharing of code and other elements of the development process across a more distributed team. The two tools currently have a multisite capability that can coordinate development servers for team members in different locations. The servers are periodically updated and synchronized so that team members working on the same project can stay abreast of one another's work on a daily or hourly basis. A developer in one location might ask why another developer changed a file that he had worked on, and could discover that his counterpart was fixing a defect that had been discovered in testing, Devlin noted.

In addition, IBM is now referring to its conglomeration of tools as the IBM Software Development Platform, which ties together tools used in Lotus Notes application development and WebSphere Application Server development, along with Rational tools. All are being redesigned to sit atop the Eclipse open-source developer's workbench. That allows them to share files and helps developers move from tool to tool in what appears to be a common user environment. For example, before Atlantic-level integration, the WebSphere Studio tools for developing applications had a different of looks and variations in developer conventions from Rational's ClearCase, ClearQuest and other tools. By year's end, WebSphere Studio, ClearCase, ClearQuest and Rational's requirements management tool, RequistePro, along with Lotus tools all will look and operate in a similar fashion. In addition, IBM plans to release a key piece of Rational source code as an open-source project later this year. It plans to make the meta model for Unified Modeling Language 2.0 available as part of Eclipse. UML is a standardized set of symbols and labels used to build diagrams or models of complex software systems. The UML meta model captures key summary information about the design and code elements of a UML-based system in a database. With access to that meta information, other tool vendors will be able to develop software that can monitor a running application and apply metrics that indicate whether it's meeting expected performance, Devlin said. They will add other enhancements around the IBM Software Platform that IBM itself might not think of or might not be able to get to as a priority, he added. In a move to ease development of user interfaces, Rational's tools will support JavaServer Faces, a set of components that developer may select as icons and drag into their applications. The components provide active elements on a Web page, such as automatic retrieval of data from a background database, or going out on the Web and pulling down a desired service.

A developer seeking to provide users with automated weather information could build a page requiring the user to enter a ZIP code, then click on a button that goes to a Web-based weather service and brings back the current information for that locale, Lee Nackman, Rational's chief technology officer, said in an interview. The goal, said Nackman, "is to let people without specialized skills write Java applications."