R-U Ready to Save the Day?

It's time to join the League of Extraordinary Software Developers at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2008, June 1-5, at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotel.

Yes, Rational User, look to the skies! The R-Signal is sweeping across the clouds with the challenge: R-U Ready to Save the Day?



We've also introduced the key 'Heroes' on Myspace.
You can type in the URLs below and engage with them via the emails provided below:

• Developer: myspace.com/rsdc2008_developer
  
• (email: rhero.phanindra@gmail.com )
• Architect: myspace.com/rsdc2008_architect
  
• (email: rhero.robert@gmail.com )
• Analyst: myspace.com/rsdc2008_analyst
  
• (email: rhero.iris@gmail.com )
• Tester: myspace.com/rsdc2008_tester
  
• (email: rhero.camille@gmail.com )
• Release Mgr: myspace.com/rsdc2008_releasemanager
  
• (email: rhero.gary@gmail.com )
• Project Mgr: myspace.com/rsdc2008_projectmanager
  
• (email: rhero.tim@gmail.com )

Murray Cantor on IT Governance

Network Computing India ran a two-page interview with Rational's Dr. Murray Cantor on the subject of IT governance. The Q&A captures Murray's opinions about the need for governance in the industry.

We've been focusing on governance a lot here on the Architecture Management team, but there's still lots of uncertainty about what is meant by IT Governance. Murray clears it up in the Q&A:

The first part is about looking at your IT organization and reasoning about the decision rights, authority so that you know that right people are making right decisions. Policies are a way of informing and constraining those decisions. They provide guidance around the decision process. The second part is about putting in place measurements and controls so that you know that the IT organization is delivering what it needs to deliver to be effective.

We're working on projects like Asset Manager to help with governance of IT assets, and you'll be seeing us add to the collaborative, analysis and accessibility aspects of the solutions over time. Right now, in fact, we're offering a rebate on Asset Manager and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) if you buy them together to help governance of your SOA assets.

Telelogic Acquisition gains EU approval

After many months of deliberations, IBM's acquisition of Telelogic was given the green light by the European Union yesterday. The news was widely reported across the globe. Some reports are linked here:

Infoworld: With the acquisition of Telelogic, IBM will become by far the largest vendor of two types of software development tools: software modelling and requirements management tools. Initially the Commission suspected that the combined strength of the two companies would skew competition in these market sectors, pushing up prices and shutting out competitors....
"The deal will not harm competition in Europe or in any part of Europe," the Commission said.

InformationWeek and, amazingly enough, PhysOrg.com also commented.

Welcome to the team, Telelogic!

Happy Anniversary to Rational!

It's been five years this week since Rational was acquired by IBM, so we're celebrating!

Of course, Rational has been around a lot longer than that - originally, we were founded way back in 1981, when we built Ada compilers and the hardware to run them on (you can go to wikipedia for a brief overview of Rational's history). We've come a long way since then! Today,

• IBM Rational delivers the industry's most complete, open, standards-based software development environment that helps developers deliver more reliable and precise, error-free code.
• IBM Rational software is the clear leader in Application Development and Project Portfolio Management (as ranked by Gartner analysts for six consecutive years).
• IBM Rational software is used by nine of the Fortune Top 10 companies, 45 of the Fortune Top 50 companies, and 87 out of the top 100 companies.
• Since the acquisition, more than 28,000 customers have purchased Rational software development solutions.
• IBM Rational has a tremendous impact on IBM's middleware portfolio. There are more than 2,000 Rational software developers within IBM focused on helping customers govern the business process of software and systems delivery.

So, let's celebrate! There's a new podcast you can listen to in which Grady Booch, Lee Nackman and Walker Royce chat about the last five years, talk about what it has meant for each company and for the software profession in general. Refinement of Rational's focus, the expansion of IBM's software paradigm, the further embracing of open source and open standards, the investment in growing technical talent, and the Jazz platform are all discussed.

For more information, check out the special anniversary page.

Get up close and personal to Asset Manager

Rational Asset Manager is coming to a city near you.

You can now sign up to attend a developerWorks Live! briefing on Asset Reuse with RAM and Rational Software Architect. The first locations are:

• El Segundo, California on March 4th
• Jacksonville, Florida on March 12th
• New York city on March 19th.

So there's got to be a location within a short 1000 mile drive from you (assuming you're in the US).
We've got both coasts covered at least! Stay tuned for more locations to come.

So, what are we showing?

Well, asset reuse is an essential strategy for companies looking to create innovative solutions to solve complex software development problems. Searching for, identifying, updating, using, and deploying software assets can be a difficult challenge. An effective reuse strategy allows you to:

• Harvest existing artifacts and build and share assets to mitigate costs and productivity concerns for analysis, development, and testing.
• Coordinate and control assets and intellectual property, determining what is shared, versioned, and visible for others to use.
• Understand the relationships between and impact of assets, such as the relationship between development time assets and the relationship to infrastructure assets.
• Govern assets across communities -- for example, one community describing needs and another community realizing needs and submitting solutions to repository.
• Govern service development and publishing into a service registry.
• Track assets effectively across an organization.

The briefing provides a high level overview of RAM and RSA - tools that can help you address the components of a successful reuse strategy. Discussions and demos introduce key software asset management definitions, challenges and solutions, including strategies and tools that can be leveraged for a successful project.

Sign up now!

Super Bowl XLII and IBM Rational!

This week, IBM will demonstrate current and future portal technologies at the Media Center during Super Bowl Week. IBM has collaborated with the NFL and other partners to build the NFL's new media portal, NFLMedia.com.

According to the press release, amongst other technologies:

IBM Rational software development and testing tools were used throughout the software development lifecycle. The league builds custom portlets with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, which pull information from a variety of internal sources to provide fresh content as it becomes available.

How cool is that! Not only can you watch the Super Bowl, you can also check out all kinds of stats and stories through the portal, safe in the knowledge that Rational technology was used to make sure it doesn't go down at the wrong moment (hopefully).

Go Giants!

Jazz now open to everyone!

Jazzed about the new year? Looking to get your hands on some cool Rational technology?

Well, now you can.

From the press release:

IBM is announcing it is opening up its development platform based on Web 2.0 technologies for developers to collaborate and contribute to software under development at www.Jazz.net. Jazz.net is an open, commercial community designed to help companies globally and transparently collaborate on the development of Jazz-based technology.

Previously only available to IBM customers, academics and partners, Jazz.net is now open to the greater software development community. IBM's vision for community-driven development expands the boundaries of how the open source community can impact global software development by not merely creating a vehicle for feedback after products have been developed, but enabling the global community to be a part of IBM's development process from start to finish.

So, hop on over to Jazz.net and sign up!

New Software from Rational

Rational today announced new software to help complex systems developers meet specific industry standards and ensure the quality and reliability of complex real-time and embedded applications.

This category of software developers faces monumental challenges - not only getting the job done, but doing so in a manner that doesn't risk lives at the end of the day. Rational is taking the complexity out of the development of complex systems. By simplifying adherence to protocols, standards and code review, systems developers are better able to ensure that the lines of code they are writing are in line with broader project goals - increasing reliability, levels of precision and effectiveness, and higher degrees of error free code.

Amongst the updated offerings are IBM Rational Systems Developer and IBM Rational Software Modeler - and check out the other updates here.

Rational Application Developer Open Beta!

Want to get your hands on the latest and greatest version of Rational Application Developer before it's released? Now, you can! Yesterday the Open Beta for RAD v7.5 went live, and it's accessible from here.

Among the cool new features in this beta:

• Increasing developer productivity: Achieve greater individual and team productivity with increased support for iterative development for JEE5 applications that takes advantage of the annotation based programming model, with enhanced support for creation, validation, refactoring, and deletion of artifacts.


• Enterprise Information System (EIS) Adapters: Tooling for JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft to improve the developer productivity with these enterprise systems. The Discovery Wizard will support generic, EMD and J2C, including supporting the new metadata import/export framework. The adapters will also have enterprise metadata discovery componentized for consumption by a rich client.


• Delivering New & Emerging Programming models & Applications: Enhanced capabilities to deliver modern applications in emerging programming models using tools that help create EJB 3.0, JPA, Web Services with JAX-WS 2.0/JAX-B 2.0 and reliable secure profile applications. Additional support for the new JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1 and Servlet 2.5 standards is provided.


• Latest Standards support: Includes latest standards, such as JEE5, RSP 1.0, WS-Policy Assertions for Web Services, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing, MTOM, SOAP 1.2, WS-Secure Conversation and SIP (JSR 289).

What are you waiting for? Download now!

XML 2007

I'm on the road again in a couple of weeks - this time at the XML 2007 conference in Boston on December 3rd through 5th at the Marriott Copley Place:

I'll be showing Rational Application Developer's XML tools - for those who are not aware of this, we have some powerful XML tools in our Architecture Management tools, including:

• DTD editor
• XML editor
• XML Schema editor
• XSL editor
• XPath Expression wizard
• XML to XML Mapping editor
• XSL debugging and transformation
• Generating Java beans from an XML schema
• Generating HTML documentation from an XML schema file
• Generating XML schema file from XML, DTD, and relational tables

and, in Rational Software Architect:

• UML to XSD transformations

While I'm on the subject of RAD, the Rational Application Developer Programming Guide has been updated for version 7. It's available as a free PDF download from here.

In it, there's a whole chapter (Chapter 12) on the XML development environment. Check it out, and don't forget to visit me at the XML 2007 conference exhibition.

Submit your papers for RSDC now!

Call for papers for RSDC 2008 in Orlando is now open!

We're looking for good, technical presentations on architecture and construction. Topics such as SOA, modeling or case studies using RAD or RSA are welcome. So be an R-Hero and join us in sunny Florida next summer!

Grady will answer you rquestions...

Following up from an earlier post, there's now a page up that you can go to where you'll be able to sign up for Grady's Q&A session. Details are below:

Nov 29 at 1:00pm eastern
Grady Booch on Architecture: Join Grady in an interactive discussion around architecture and reuse. Get your questions answered.
Registration opening soon!

Here's the link: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/talks/

Computerworld Booch article.

Wow, this blog seems to have turned into all Grady, all the time.

Just wanted to point everyone to a new article in Computerworld magazine this week. It's a Q&A session with Grady, going into details about the difficulties of software development, open source and Second Life. You can check it out here.

By the way, just like me, he's also a big Mac fan (just got my copy of Leopard yesterday, and the install on my wife's ibook went flawlessly. I'm now enjoying all the shiny Leopardy goodness).

Rational and Data-driven Applications

Well, I'm back from Vegas (and fortunately, with most of the family fortune intact) with IOD 2007 just a distant memory.

While at the show however, I got my eyes opened to the sheer amount of data, information and content floating around the world. Managing, understanding and delivering that content to users is what IOD was all about, and Rational plays a part in the process too - by building the applications that deliver the content. So, with that in mind, I've put together some articles that explain how to leverage data in your applications using Rational Architecture Management tools. Here are some links:

• Generate Web Services for DB2 9 pureXML
• Visual Data Modeling in Rational Application Developer
• Create web services for DB2 stored procedures
• Enabling a service-oriented architecture with SDO and the JDBC Data Access Service

More Demo Excitement

More new demos went live today, this time showing you how you can use Rational Application Developer, DB2 and WebSphere Application Server together:

Learn how to create a DB2 database, populate the database, link the database to Rational Application Developer, build a Web project in Rational Application Developer, create a JSP page with your database values, and publish the project to WebSphere Application Server.

You can find them here:

Build a Web application without writing any code: Install and configure Rational Application Developer, DB2, and WebSphere Application Server

Build a Web application without writing any code, Part 2: Build the application using Rational Application Developer, DB2, and WebSphere Application Server

Free Tools from IBM webcast tomorrow..

Don't forget to register for tomorrow's webcast "From Development to Deployment: Application Development with Free Tools from IBM", which discusses how you can use freely downloadable tools from IBM like WebSphere Application Developer Community Edition and DB2 Express-C along with Eclipse and Eclipse support to build and deploy web applications.

It should be a fun time, so register here!

Other great places to visit

Here are some other links I thought I'd share with you.

Our colleague Brian Bryson over on the Quality Management marketing team has his own not-to-be-missed blog, The Rational Tester.

Also not to be missed is Grady Booch's blog over on IBM developerWorks. Grady is pretty much our hero, so definitely check out what he has to say.

Finally, there are lots of great blogs over on the IBM Blogroll, so it's worth heading over there to browse the random musings of IBMers.

We're on iTunes!

Rationally Speaking is now available on iTunes - you can download our video podcasts right to your iPod, and watch them on your way to work (assuming you're not diving!). Here's the link that'll take you directly to the new videos, but you can also search in iTunes for "IBM Rational".

We'll be adding new demos and videos over time, so go ahead and subscribe!

If you don't have iTunes, you can get it for free here.

Pictures from the show....

Well, it was a busy first session at SD Best Practices yesterday - lots of people stopped by the booth to chat about Architecture and Construction tools. I snapped a couple of (really low quality) pictures with my phone. First, you can't miss the IBM booth!


We have one tiny little corner of the IBM mega-booth. I'm hiding behind a huge post, so you'll really have to work to find me (ha! - qualified leads!!):


And finally, a general shot of the booth, with Mr. Brian Bryson excitedly talking about testing with a conference-goer.

Don't forget that there's still time to make it out to the booth today - so if you haven't yet - what are you waiting for?

Building Web Services with RAD

Here's the latest Rational Application Developer video demo - this will also be available as a podcast in iTunes, and on YouTube, so check it out!

For more information on Rational Application Developer, go see the main page at IBM.