I am seeing a growing number of blogs, forum threads and comments dealing with IBM Rational and its support (or lack thereof) of Spring technologies. 

According to IBM, "most [Spring] features install successfully" into RAD 7.5.x (the latest I could find, welcome to an update), though this is obviously not always the case. As seen in the above-referenced forum thread, some community leaders are even recommending working around company mandates to utilize Spring with other tools and then faking it when the boss is looking.

As someone on the MyEclipse Bling team and therefore someone who attempts to solve this issue with a commercial alternative, I am admittedly biased. 

But, how are you solving this problem? As more and more developers at an enterprise level move towards Spring technologies, is IBM getting in the way, helping or something in between? If you use Spring, how would you (or do you) solve this problem?

Really, if you're using Rational, your a drone who is suffering while trying to make a living anyway.

My experience is that if you're using Spring in Eclipse, you're using MyEclipse or Spring Tool Suite. Which is better depends on your experience - but you're not bothinring to use Spring in Rational and expect anything to work, because that's just how rational rolls.

In fact, giving credit where its do, MyEclipse is the only company that tries to actually get the integration right. Everyone else says "sure we integrate" but can't get any of the integrations right, and they all complain about the competition because it shows what people use.

I'd never use Rational where i could use MyEclipse. I've recommended MyEclipse to a few people and never been disappointed in the results. Can't say that I've ever been pleased with Rational.

We make use of WAS within our company and we do have a number of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) projects. Therefore it is of no surprise that we have to make use of RAD to create our EJBs as Websphere has a tendency to complain if all the little ejb resource files which are specific to IBM are not generated properly.

But we also extensively make use of Spring enabled POJOs and some of our new EJBS also are Spring enabled. So we make sure that all EJBS have minimal logic whilst most of the logic sit within the Spring enabled pojo(s) which we can then at leisure work with in  STS (Spring Tool Suite ) although do note that this seperation was not dictated by the IDE but rather a specific architectural one.

The use of maven2 also has helped decrease the dependency on RAD by allowing the EJB stubs to be generated outside of RAD from the command line itself. Although there are some tweaking requried for it to generate the stubs properly for  EJB 2 and 3.

So I do not think that using Rational would prevent you from making use of Spring we are using Spring 3.0.x by the way.

kind regards,

   Javed 

Actually it is possible to integrate SpringIDE with RSA/RAD. It's just that nobody actually cares anymore.

https://github.com/ilx/springide4rsa

https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-693

If somebody is willing to pay me I will gladly maintain patches that DO WORK with RSA. It's just sad truth that nobody really wants it (neither IBM nor SpringSource).

One advanatge of RAD is that it comes with an instance of WebSphere App Server (WAS).  Does MyEclipse Bling come with WAS?

One advanatge of RAD is that it comes with an instance of WebSphere App Server (WAS).  Does MyEclipse Bling come with WAS?

Roberto;

IBM gives away the WAS runtime for free, so we have users utilize that. It is the same runtime used in RAD.

Jens