IBM Rational Shows Off New Programming Direction With Atlantic

IBM Rational gave developers a peek at the next version of its tools portfolio at the Rational Software Development User Conference in Dallas Monday.

The next version of the IBM Software Development Platform, code-named Atlantic, will be available before the end of the year, said Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM Rational, in a press conference following his opening keynote.

Devlin did not mention Atlantic during his speech, which lacked actual news content and was more a summation of where IBM Rational has been focused in the context of parent company IBM's on-demand strategy. However, Lee Nackman, IBM Rational CTO, gave a demo of Atlantic during the morning keynote, though he was vague on details.

A press release and comments made during a post-keynote press conference shed more light on Atlantic. During his keynote, Devlin said IBM Rational is focused on creating a unifying tools platform based on open standards such as Java, Web services and--perhaps most importantly--the Eclipse open-source framework, which provides comprehensive capabilities for three main aspects of development: discover, develop and deploy.

"The basic idea is a unifying platform, with tools to help the whole team work together, even if the team is distributed [geographically] with different skills," Devlin said. "We offer a set of role-specific capabilities that help individuals whether they are an analyst, developer or tester, and keep them together in a way that they can work as a team."Among the features of the Atlantic release are different perspectives, or views, for developers depending on their role, Nackman said. For example, a developer might look at the user interface and see development tasks he or she must complete and, once those are complete, a code tester will see that there is new functionality in an application that needs to be tested before the application can be deployed.

Atlantic also will beef up support for JavaServer Faces, a Java standard for building Web-enabled GUIs, and Service Data Objects, a standard co-developed by IBM and BEA Systems that enables developers to link applications to databases in services-oriented architectures. Other new features that will be supported in Atlantic are UML 2.0, the latest version of the modeling standard, and realtime deployment to the WebSphere Application Server.

The next version of the IBM Software Development Platform also will include support for C and C++ applications, a move that demonstrates IBM Rational's continued commitment to work with Microsoft even though the software giant is arguably IBM Rational's main competitor, Devlin said.

Microsoft was one of the sponsors of the show, he said, and IBM Rational continues to be a Visual Studio integration partner, with plans to support Visual Studio 2005 when it is available next year. Despite this display of solidarity, IBM Rational's plans for Atlantic seem to be directly competitive with Microsoft's plans for Visual Studio.

Bola Rotibi, a software development strategies analyst at Ovum, said it seems IBM Rational's goal with Atlantic is to create a collaborative development environment much like what Microsoft is attempting to tackle with Visual Studio Team System 2005, the new SKU for Visual Studio, Enterprise Edition, due out next year.While it is possible to build a collaborative environment with IBM Rational's existing portfolio, "the onus is on the customer" to make use of the software in that way, she said. "Basically, IBM Rational is, rightly so, taking on the collaborative environment," Rotibi said.

Rotibi said engineering the IBM Software Development Platform in this way should help boost the usability of IBM Rational tools, which have traditionally lacked the mass appeal of Microsoft's tools because of their complexity.

IBM also should also consider different, more affordable, pricing models for the Rational tools if it wants to make its tools more palatable to a broader developer space and SMB customer, she added. "I think IBM has done a lot to streamline their own tools/processes to make them palatable to the midmarket, but they have to go further in terms of pricing," Rotibi said. "If you look at how much IBM Rational tools cost, they're not cheap."

Devlin said IBM Rational is considering different pricing models in light of aggressive tools pricing from Microsoft and Sun Microsystems but had made no decisions at this time.

Another area of focus for IBM Rational in the future will be asset management, though executives were not clear on how this will be integrated into the product line. Asset management refers to allowing developers to be aware of all the applications and software development entities, or assets, in an IT system, and to manage them and reuse them so development becomes more efficient. "Asset-based development is very compatible with all of our best practices," Devlin said at the press conference. But he did not elaborate on how IBM Rational would inject asset management into its product line.Ovum's Rotibi said IBM Rational might leverage components of the WebSphere Asset Analyzer to add relevant functions to the IBM Software Development Platform but admitted that executives "haven't filled the strategy out with very much substance yet."

Still, she said asset management should go a long way in helping make software development more efficient. "The problem is not necessarily in what is development but in understanding what you already have," Rotibi said. "One of the key things is understanding your assets, dependencies and associations with each other. You can't go forward unless you understand where you're coming from."

In other news at the conference Monday, IBM introduced a new toolset for IBM Workplace, an IBM Lotus group-driven initiative to build a secure, rich client interface that allows for the componentization and reuse of legacy applications.

Workplace is widely seen as IBM's answer to Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft Windows. In the Workplace tools suite, IBM unveiled WebSphere Studio Device Developer 5.7, which helps developers extend applications from the desktop onto a range of devices, including laptops, mobile clients and the like, said Gary Cohen, IBM's general manager of pervasive computing.

Also in the package of new tools is Workplace Builder, which is designed for line-of-business users with limited application development experience, he said. Workplace Builder assembles reusable IT components into applications for the Workplace platform.Other tools in the suite are the Workplace API Toolkit for ISVs, Business Partners and customers to integrate their software with Workplace; and Workplace Designer, a visual, enterprise-level scripting tool for building stand-alone business applications for Workplace. The new IBM Workplace tools will be part of the larger IBM Software Development Platform and will be available at the end of the month, Cohen said.