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IBM Buys Rational Software
An anonymous reader writes "Rational Software is going to be taken over by IBM. More info on Rational's website. RIP Rational. This is what rational is sending it's customers:
To our valued customers:
We are delighted to tell you that IBM and Rational Software have announced a definitive agreement for IBM to purchase Rational. This is a very exciting time for both companies and builds on the extensive business relationship IBM and Rational have had for over 20 years. Most importantly, it will provide significant benefits to you." Other readers submit links to the story in InformationWeek and the Mercury News.
After record losses this past quarter and a stock plunge from 70 dollars to 4 in the past year, Rational was on its way out. I'm not sure how much of Rational IBM is really planning on keeping around or whether they simply bought them for their software they wanted and planned on burying the rest of the company, but here's hoping they don't all get canned. I've been using ClearCase on Solaris for years, and it's really an excellent product.
Best configuration management software I ever used was CMVC from IBM. It was then replaced by TeamConnection and then canned because IBM made an agreeement with Rational to promote their ClearCase product, which everyone I know who had use CMVC found ClearCase to be inferior.
Now that Rational is being bought, IBM, can you make CMVC/Team Connection open source? God I would like to work again with CVMC...
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Anyone looking for similar functionality in an open source package may want to check out Valgrind. It is "an open-source memory debugger for x86-GNU/Linux". I've used it for a short while and its great.
Valgrind:
http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
Rational Rose is the shittiest piece of software I have ever had to use. We have to use it in some CS and SE classes to draw UML diagrams and it is total crap. Not only that but the program costs like thousands of dollars from what I hear.
By judging the one piece of software they make that I have used I can tell you that Rational was not a very good company. Hopefully IBM will fix them so another CS student need not suffer.
ROSE is one of those packages like say I-DEAS that is very frustrating if you don't already know how it works and what to use it for. It does a hell of a lot more than "draw UML diagrams" - if that's all you wanted to do, you should have been using Visio.
If you ever work on a project with a development team of a hundred or more OO developers, then you need what Rational's tools like ROSE have got, there's really nothing else that can manage projects that complex. Harsh as this may sound, if you're an undergraduate you really don't qualify to have an opinion on ROSE either way.
Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
Yes, but can Visio generate C++ from your UML, let you modify the C++, then import it back into the UML editor with all your changes intact? It's called "round trip engineering" and if you aren't doing it, you wasted your money buying ROSE!
fucked company internal memo here was it so hard to provide a link to it?
Note also that IBM sells a high-end, "supported" version of Eclipse called WebSphere Studio Workbench. This is aimed squarely at the big-bucks* enterprise software development market, the same folks who buy Rational Rose. There's huge money to be made in that market, and IBM wants it.
(*Freudian slip: I originally typed "big bugs".-)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Togethersoft can do transparent roundtrip engineering.
Rational just manages to mangle code going both ways.
That doesn't change the fact that Rose is shite. It can do all sorts of things, but I never found one it would do *well* (besides annoying me).
I agree that you need tools *like* Rose, but you sure don't need Rose.
Let's see what I've seen it do:
* Ruin hours of manual diagram layout by rerouting all associations because I had the audacity to move *one* class. Undo? Sure. Moved my class right back. Didn't restore any other part of the layout though.
* Refuse to save any files unless the user had administrative privileges under Windows NT.
* Destroy an entire model (it refused to read back the file it saved) when I pasted some classes from a different model into a class diagram.
* Throw away all my source code when I used the "round-trip" functionality. Thanks, Rational. I guess I didn't really need those method bodies.
And those are only the onese I remember after a couple of years of repressing memories of using Rational Rose.
My *best* Rose memory was sending a bunch of licenses back with a message saying that we couldn't accept the license agreement (which said that Rational wouldn't guarantee that our $12k of software would actually *do* anything). Man, that was fun. We went out and bought stuff from TogetherSoft instead.
What about ArgoUML?
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Rational has jumped the Linux wagon quite a while ago, but only half-hearted: /lib/modules/fs (?), not in the standard places), so I had to edit that one BIG TIME.
They (speaking of MVFS[1]) used to "support" only RedHat, with newer versions (v5) there was almost no chance to run a custom kernel, you have to take a specific RedHat SRPM with correct release-sub-patched-by-redhat-version (2.4.9-11 for example). If you want to do it, leave the "Verbose bug-reporting"-feature on (Section: Kernel Hacking), else you have no chance.
The most recent kernel they support is (please don't nail me if it's wrong) 2.4.18-11 (no sure about the 11).
So far for the kernel.
In their startup-script "atria", there were various hard-coded things (e.g. the path to mvfs.o, which is placed in
If you didn't like those things, let's come to the best:
The most common version is 4.X - the newest is 5.0 and is able to run on 2.4.X kernels (notes above strongly underlined) - but that one is totally uncompatible with the 4.X version.
So - use 4.X with kernel _2.2.14-2.4.16_ and only those.
This was enough to for me to refuse the (as client) installation on our[2] Linux compute-server (matlab and various simulation, speech recognition and the like) as the data is mostly lying in clearcase-views.
It HAS a lot of USEFUL features and the "multisite"-support I've only seen with BitKeeper. It _is_ quite powerful. But nonetheless VERY slow and you need big backend servers and an quite watchful admin, as some, maybe more multisite-updates fail the first time you want to apply them.
-- -
[1] Multi-Versioned-File-System, built on top of NFS let's you mount a "view" into the local filesystem and perform various operations like checkout/in/...
This is required, else you have to do "exported views", that are mountable via NFS v3 (only that version). With those, you only have a static view over your repository and no possibility to alter the content.
[2] I work for a larger company doing mobile phone / base-station design and deployment.
ClearCase was originally developed by Atria Software, which was acquired by Pure to form PureAtria, then bought by Rational Software, which is now part of IBM - got that? :)
Here's a couple more small things:
- Try to do a rename on a file in CVS and retain the element history. ClearCase does this correctly without having to muck with the repository by hand.
- ClearCase at it's core has a real ACID database to do a better job of preventing data corruption. CVS does not, which can lead to problems - notice newer open source CM solutions (Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.) have followed suit.
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/r/ratl.html
In this tech investment climate, combined with the large amount of cash on hand at Rational, it is pretty easy to see why IBM thought this was a reasonable investment. Take a look at the close to $1 billion RATL has in cash/short-term investments:
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/r/ratl_qb.html
I'm sure they wished they could have closed the deal when RATL stock was around $5 instead of $10, but this is about the longer term in preparing IBM to dominate as infrastructure spending improves.
Envy went into the VisualAge series. Note that Eclipse is NOT the latest version of VisualAge; Eclipse doesn't use the envy repository (it uses CVS instead).
:(
I've used both, and I much prefer VisualAge. The IDE is bound to the JVM (bad), but the environment allows you to work in an object-oriented way; I can pull out a class and work with it. I can pull out a method and look at that. In Eclipse, everything is file-based; to work with a method, the IDE just scrolls to the right place in the text file
Also, the VisualAge debugger was 1000X better than Eclipse. Try step-through debugging with both. Try dropping to a selected frame in the execution stack rather than restarting your app from the beginning.
Just wanted to clarify that Ecipse isn't really the next iteration of VisualAge; it's a replacement product which is getting better every release.
I've used Rational Rose since the 98 version and I would say it has improved in it's stability and flexibility. The real time round trip C# code generation from UML models in Rational XDE is also quite nice. However, when I recently worked for a client who wanted to begin introducing formalized requirements and analysis to their developers, I could not help the tech director justify the cost of Rational products. So instead, we discovered Enterprise Architect for Windows from Sparx Systems, an Aussie company. From $95-180 per seat for a single user, this tool can do most anything Rose Enterprise Edition can. In addition, it includes better tools for doing project estimation, risk management, and requirements traceability. Plus - the data format is either MS-Access, MS SQL, or MySQL. Therefore, you can have multiple users working on the same model. Truly worth looking into if the only reason you're not using UML tools is price.
we are mostly a hardware company
Not even hardly. IBM is mostly a services company (over half of IBM's employees and about half of their revenue hail from the services division). Over the last year, IBM has sold off a lot of its hardware lines, including -- most recently -- its hard drives.
We also sell a set of software engineering tools
That they do. However, you linked to VAGenerator, a product that is being sunsetted. What they DO produce is the Open Source-based (i.e. Eclipse-based) WebSphere Studio Application Developer.
we'll probably integrate Rational's tools with that
You betcha -- but a lot of it has already been done. WSAD already integrates with ClearCase. Rational also has a product called Rational XDE that already gives somewhat-Rose-like integration into WSAD.
The
"Not being a Notes user, I don't know what the name of the Notes .exe is. I'm curious. If it's ALSO "lotus.exe" then we'd have a complete explanation."
.exe is nnotes.exe or notes.exe. Unless you're talking about the server, which is nserver.exe.
The
(The server, by the way, which offers a real alternative to M$ exchange. No, you don't have to use the Notes client to use the Domino server. A web browser or MS Outlook are viable alternatives, and I *think* you could even make it work with Eudora.)
I hear that IBM is planning a product for next year that will answer all the critics of the "bloatware" supposedly released by Lotus.