Stories about: Rational Software

IBM Rational on Thursday is announcing plans to provide technical support for the Eclipse open source tools platform, thus giving customers a single point of contact for both open source and IBM's commercial technologies for software development. IBM will also unveil plans for upcoming tools geared to the new Eclipse 3.2 platform, and it is rolling out online developer resources for Eclipse users. IBM is making the announcements at the EclipseWorld conference.

IBM made a play for a bigger share of the information management market Thursday with its plans to acquire FileNet, a publicly held company based in California, for US$1.6 billion.

IBM Rational Monday unveiled enhancements to a slew of tools designed to help companies break down the silos that exist in development organizations and track activities throughout the application development life cycle.

Governance in software development will be a key focus at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2006 event in June, an IBM official said this week.

Nothing in enterprise IT should exist in isolation. That's the big idea underlying SOA -- leverage existing data and application assets by provisioning them as shareable services, and when you build new functionality, create it as a service so that current and future apps can draw on its power.

Recognising a role for its big-iron boxes in contemporary SOA environments, IBM is unveiling tools and initiatives intended to give its mainframe more prominence in SOA.

Looking for a better way to help corporate software developers meet compliance demands, IBM said Tuesday that it has acquired BuildForge.

IBM announced Tuesday that it has acquired BuildForge, a company that builds software designed to allow users to automate their software development processes to meet audit and compliance requirements.

With enterprise application development largely dividing into two camps -- the Java-derived Eclipse faction on one side and Microsoft's .Net on the other -- it would seem that Java founder Sun Microsystems would align itself with the Eclipse Foundation. But Sun remains outside Eclipse, although an open invitation remains to participate in the open source tools organization.

Seeking to more easily accommodate distributed development, IBM later this year plans to modernise its Rational software lifecycle management products to make them strictly Web-based.

For Web apps, 2005 was the year of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). In addition to bringing rich GUIs to many high-profile commercial apps, AJAX got a boost from some top-notch toolkits including Backbase, JackBe, and Tibco General Interface. We also witnessed the emergence of static code analysis tools -- from vendors such as Compuware, Coverity, Fortify Software, and Secure Software -- as a promising way to identify software defects and security issues. JRules 5.0 broke new ground in exposing business rules to business users, and Borland reigned in our roundup of enterprise Java IDEs.