Friday, February 6, 2009

IBM Rational products I didn't know about

Finally I managed to find some time and go through the complete list of IBM Rational products. Here is a list of tools I found interesting and new to me:
  • Rational Host Integration Solution. It looks like an advanced screen-scrambler for existing [ugly] mainframe user interfaces, powered by Rational Host Access Transformation Services. They say it's done "without changing the existing applications". Kinda telnet2ws.
  • Rational Software Analyzer. This static software analyzer looks promising, it supports C++, Java and something else. What I'm interested in is 500+ code review rules for Java. I tried to run it against one of our projects, and it produces some quite impressive results. I mean, something I wouldn't notice in an everyday life. The major drawback is that the installation is >600 Mb, which is just too much for such a simple thing (I would prefer to have it just as a downloadable plugin for my RSA). Furthermore, Rational Software Architect which I use as a main tool already have limited support for such analysis (providing just 200+ rules).
  • Rational Business Developer. After reading this: "EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) compliments the breadth and depth of Java and COBOL technology with a simplified, more abstract development paradigm", I imagined an EGL editor with a radiobutton allowing to choose one of these: "Generate COBOL code", "Generate Java code". No COBOL please. Also they compare it with .NET for a task of retreiving data from IBM mainframe (!). In the end they claim something like "yep, we knew it would happen. Dotnet sucks, it doesn't work with mainframes". In fact, that PDF is the most exciting thing about RBD, and reading it somehow resembles watching Belarussian political news on government TV channel (that's exaclty the situation when one look is worth a hundered words).
Wheeew! To be continued.

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