IBM announced that it plans to turn WebSphere Studio over to its "Rational" group. The shift comes at a time when IBM has been endeavoring to position its developer tools product line against that of arch rival Microsoft.

The Rational group's current tools portfolio includes all the products that it brought with it to IBM as part of the acquisition, including Rose and ClearCase, which are widely used despite hefty price tags.

Among other things, the shift will reduce redundancy and overlap.

What is also interesting is that the Rational Group has vowed to support the Microsoft .Net platform in more or less the same proportions as J2EE. Could this change in strategy perhaps decrease the effectiveness of IBM's J2EE drive?

One thing is for sure, no analyst can claim that this isn't a Rational move.

Read more about this at:

IBM 'Rationalizes' Tool Strategy
IBM has Rational take lead in development tool integration
IBM Development Coalescing Around Rational
IBM tools revamp targets Microsoft

Sandeep

This is a good move for IBM, I think. WSAD is great and having it decoupled from Websphere might be a good move LT. I like WSAD a lot, granted it is a lot like eclipse.

Right, WSAD is what Eclipse would be, if their development team was larger and they decided to create a full J2EE IDE instead of "just" a java editor. But that doesn't make it bad. The speed in which you can switch from developing to testing your code on the embedded servers is in my opinion the biggest benefit of WSAD.

That said, I am not THAT sure if this is a good decision. Surely it is reasonable for IBM to put those two IDE groups together. But is the rational team really standing behind this very "political" product and it's strategies? WSAD is no modelling tool. It is very code-centric, just like the eclipse base. Rational is not famous for code centric thinking. They may have great knowhow in model centric development but if WSAD should stand against MS Studio, that is not the killing feature of choice, since this view most likely is too abstract for the targeted developer community.

Maybe I would think brighter about this if I knew Rational's own IDEs better. Are they really that "brainy" as I sketched them?

This is the beginning of the end for WSAD. Rational IDEs are not at all intuitive and user-friendly. The same will happen to WSAD.

<snip>
This is the beginning of the end for WSAD. Rational IDEs are not at all intuitive and user-friendly. The same will happen to WSAD.
</snip>
I wasn't aware that Rational had any IDEs. Modeling, test, configuration management tools yes - but they always focus on integrating with existing IDEs instead of developing their own.

----Trond

Rational has produced the XDE which is based on Eclipse. I havn't tried it myself, but Proper implementation could make a great product. Maybe it will be cancelled in favour of WSAD with a UML plugin?

Rose XDE

Anders,

there's also Rational Rapid Developer. No a full-blown IDE, but targeted at RAD developers.

<snip>
there's also Rational Rapid Developer. No a full-blown IDE, but targeted at RAD developers
</snip>
This is a product which Rational bought a year or two ago. It have never been strategic for Rational to make IDEs and I guess that this RAD tool will be converted to a eclipse platform.

---- Trond

XDE can be standalone (Eclipse plus plugin) or used as a plugin to the Eclipse Platform. It also is a "plugin" to VS.Net.

They dont just throw the code over the fence and say here you go get working on it, we are talking about teams and architects and skilled developers. Thes people understand the product and the direction IBM is taking it. This will speed up the adoption of Eclipse within Rationals products they will have these excellent developers who can pass on these skills.

Stop worrying.

Matt Perrins
IBM

From your comment it is left UNCLEAR whether the ORIGINAL developers are going to continue to develop the product, or will the product be handed to RATIONAL developers.

Are you just reclassifying the original IBM developers to be 'rational developers' or will DIFFERENT developers within the rational organization be taking over the product.

My concern as a developer is that RATIONAL HAS NEVER DEVELOPED a QUALITY product. In fact, most of their products are VERY LOW QUALITY. They may have good IDEAS, but their products are VERY LOW QUALITY products.

Having suffered through the abyssmal Rational crapware (Rose, ClearCase, ClearQuest), I think this is HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE, DEPRESSING news for the Eclipse platform.

Eclipse it *wonderful*, the antithesis of Rational sludge.

Sign ... guess we'll be switching back to NetBeans in a year or two.

<quote>
This is the beginning of the end for WSAD. Rational IDEs are not at all intuitive and user-friendly. The same will happen to WSAD.
</quote>

Heh, I thought it already had. After waiting for a couple of minutes to load, and then trying to find the right context menu buried under context menus, I gave up.

Rob

Rational is no longer a seperate company. This announcement does not imply that the developers of the product are changing, or that some other company with different management is taking over. It is a category move, Tools-> Rational, that has many exciting opportunities to enhance Visualization. This does not imply that the product will be disconnected from WebSphere Deployment or the J2EE platform in anyway. I know many people will use media to push out an opinion that is not based on truth but preference as an excuse to proliferate a wrong message.


Comments are my own and not my employer IBM

Once you let the Rational team mess with the good thing the end result will not be pretty. I think all of us share our poor view of Rational ROSE. The only people who liked Rational products were those who never had to use it. Rational has a track record of ruining good software. Anybody remember what happened to Purify once Rational bought them? Bloat and instability is all they added.

I have to admit, while I've never used a tool before and after Rational got their hands on it, my experience with Rational tools thus far has not impressed me. It is amazing to me that a company whose 'Rational Unified Process' is emphasized by some people as a strong way to build quality software produces such poor software on a regular basis.

Rational RequisitePro, which I spent four months using this year, is flaky, slow, and basically adds very little value over using Microsoft Word or, alternately, a database, to manage software requirements.

Rose is slightly better - it's still flaky, expensive, and missing a lot of features that it deserves, but it seems, at least, better than nothing if you need to build a model.

This does not exactly fill me with confidence for the future of WSAD.

It makes me feel that we will soon taste the MDA power. Just try out XDE and WSAD and imagine both integrated with the new cool features from Eclipse 3.0

Fantastic!

I downloaded Rational Application Developer trial version. Fact is, it is based on Eclipse 3.0, which anyone would tell you is one of the best IDE platforms out there. Also there are various additional features that WSAD 5.1.2 lacked especially with emerging J2EE technologies. I believe in standards and the fact that Rational is one of the best industry Standards for J2EE development is very apealing to me. Don't be critical unless you personally have tried RAD and not liked it. Fine I agree XDE was a fools errand but RAD is everything WSAD was not and Eclipse 3.0 was witht he added features of Rational Standards.

This is a good thing to happen.

Cheers!!!!!