Slashdot Mirror
Rational Atlantic Eclipse Based Solutions
An anonymous reader writes "The following articles highlight major enhancements to the core Rational software solutions. These solutions, code-named Atlantic, help unify development team members on the open Eclipse framework and more tightly link business, development, and operations organizations."
Who the hell paid to have this shit story posted?!!!
it sounds like some marketing droid came up with that article blurb. Sorry, but that's what it sounds like.
Buzzz, buzz, buzz framework blah blah blah
BINGO!
Is it possible to have article summaries that at least clue intelligent people, who are ignorant to the latest brand name warm-fuzzy methodologies, into the gist of the article?
Something like, "atlantic, is a ______ that works with Eclipse, a ___________________________."
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Sounds like some marketing droid sent in a press release anonymously.
>fp?
I don't know how this hit the fp.
Sorry, can't help. Really shouldn't have hit the front page, should it?
"tightly link business, development, and operations organizations"
Yes, but does it create synergy between the different organizations? What about leveraging the intellectual quotient of the engineering staff? Does it have any value-added features to enhance the bottom line? Please tell us what to think Rational!!!
It seems that these tools are rather Java/IT centric and really don't touch upon Embedded Software Engineering Projects that use C/Assembly.
this shouldn't have hit ANY page after a day of mediocre, but not useless posts, Hemos seems to have dropped the ball on this one eh?
We just spend a month and a hald trying to demo Clearcase LT at work. I tried installing it three times and it never worked. The Rational tech support didn't have a clue and their answers seemed applicable to Clearcase not Clearcasr LT. One guy got it working with the client and server installed on one machine but we never could get it working right. I set up subversion in < 30 minutes and even the dumbest developer in our group figured out ho to check stuff out and commit changes.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
that has no clue what the article is about? Atlantic Eclipse?! WTF!
Who else read the title to this and wondered if it were something having to do with predicting tsunamis in the Atlantic Ocean or about watching solar eclipses from the Atlantic Ocean?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Here at work I am forced to use Rational Rose for C++ design. I have rarely encountered a worse visual tool in 15 years of programming. The UI is buggy, unintuative, and at the end of the day doesn't do much considering the price. Avoid it if you can. There is still a need in the development world for a program class designer that can both generate or synchronize with sources. A Dia module would be nice.
an ill wind that blows no good
I, for one, welcome out new...er...what the hell does Rational do again?
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
I know that /. isn't a general news site so maybe the submission pool is a little low but what is this shit? How can this be posted but the story about the government buying up columnists to generate public press is nowhere to be found? It isn't technology news but maybe YRO or something.
The tools themselves are decent and if you are familiar with modelling, are a great help. But woe betide you if you step off the well-beaten path - finding out how to implement some of the lesser known features of UML2 is an excercise in frustration. For example, take the feature called "gates" used in sequence diagram. The entire documentation for Rational Software Modeler doesnt come up with any relevant hit.
Then there are the scripting capabilities of the tools. I know that there are such capabilities, since IBM / Rational does provide consultant written extensions to do certain tasks. But good luck finding out how to write such extensions. IBM / Rational's strategy appears to be "pay us for the tools and pay us for the consultants that will make them really useful", which seems to me to be a stupid strategy. But then, since they are laughing all the way to the bank, and I have $0.02 in my bank account, maybe they know something that I dont.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Now that I can tightly link my business and marketing with a new semantic oriented paradigm shift that's horizontally compatible with my vertical integration, I can finally think outside the box and my dynamicism will be prolific!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Or is Rational now selling liquids containing dissolved substances?
Have you read my blog lately?
Oh wait - who cares???
Dumb slashdot.
Yeah, that will happen. They will want a word plugin.
regarding major development tooling it makes you wonder just how technically clued up people really are around here.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I did RTFA, I'm familiar with Rational's product line, but I'm not sure what exactly this is supposed to do? As many others have pointed, this looks a lot more like maketing-babble than anything useful.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Rational Rose is commercial software, right? I'm not a developer, so feel free to tell me that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about; I promise I won't kill you like I normally would...
Why am I reading press release-style articles about commercial software on Slashdot? That's not what I come here for!
D.
We're looking at deploying Borland or Atlantic at our shop; I'm hoping for Borland Together, frankly, because I'm used to Borland products and their MDA tool looks a lot more mature. Anyone out there have first-hand knowledge to help compare and contrast? Demos and tinkering on a test box just doesn't answer enough questions for me.
Finding God in a Dog
I know Eclipse and EJB and some of the other framework pieces are either open sourced for at least free downloads but TFA is actually a whole folder of white-paper class documents and they all point to Rational...which is anything but free. I don't have enough time to wade through all that to try and figure out if there is a "solution" in it somewhere that I can afford [i.e. free-as-in-beer].
/.
This art. is probably aimed at a few project managers and PHBs with big for-profit development jobs staring up at them from their to-do lists. I wonder how many such managers even read
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Posted by Hemos on Monday January 10, @12:35PM
from the IBM is giving us a nice reach around for this one department.
The Rational Marketing Dept writes "The following articles highlight major enhancements to the core Rational software solutions. IBM Rules These solutions, code-named Atlantic, help unify development team members on the open Eclipse framework Everyone Buy Rational Tools and more tightly link business, development, and operations organizations. (Yeah we don't even know what that means)"
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Speaking of Rational software, Rose, etc. Despite the fact that the Eclipse already maintains all of the meta-data needed to produce a UML model, no one has produced a free or affordable ( $200 for single-user license) UML plugin that supports reverse engineering of source code into the model. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Rational tools are snake oil. Their adoption is an attempt by desperate managers to compensate for bad hiring decisions. I'd take 5 great developers that don't use these tools over 20 good developers that do.
Just curious.
At my company rational is the default tooling for all projects. However everyone has ended up scrapping most or all of their tools. WSAD the IDE is awful, every little thing is squirreled away somewhere, it's CVS intergation sucks (as does it's clearcase intergration). It doesn't seem to work with any but the simplest ant scripts. It so resource intensive it's just not funny (it has a 'lightweight' app server running within ffs.
;)) that doesn't do UML/Code round tripping so basically if you want to iterate there is a huge manual overhead on keeping everyrthing in sync. Don't even get me started on XDE because it's plain awful and completely unintuative. It's also prone to lock up , crash and generally misbehave.
Now IBM/Rational the company that extols iterative development (RUP_ release this cruddy version of Rational Woes (renamed
RequisitePro is also awful and doesn't work with MS Word 2003 or SP2 as far as we experienced. Rational supports response to this is to reinstall (which doesn't work and they have no other solution).
Everyone knows clearcase is rubbish so I won't even go on to talk about that.
I have seen the Altantic suite (which is a completely new mostly rewritten set of tools to replace the ones above). They do look promising but they still don't do the code round tripping which is so important for iterative development. They do have transformation (model-->code and vice versa) but these require quite considerable effort to keep in sync from what I saw.
Personally I would stay away from their software if at all possible. It has bad UI, it is memory hog, and documentation is piss poor. When IBM gobbled up Rational it did not improove the situation.
I was listening to Scott Meyers once. You know, the guy who wrote Effective XXX series. He addmitted that he could not code. And that is OK, he told us. "It is not my job, my job is to teach you to code". He is probably right, considering that his books are pretty good in my opinion. Rational has the same thing going only their software sucks.
I would think that the company, who employed people like Grady Booch could make half way decent software.
As a developer who works almost daily with Eclipse and various Rational products (Clearcase, Clearquest, etc), I can say that the passion with which I hate Clearcase knows no bounds. It's a classic case of someone building a hammer, then going looking for nails. I find it funny that no one will own up to who in our organization decided to license the entire Rational suite for our entire organization without having any of the software groups pilot test it first.
I also find it funny that the curious Frankenstein XDE (Eclipse + Rose welded together) product wasn't mentioned anywhere in the article... despite that being in the suite, none of our developers actually use it. They all still use Rose and Eclipse separately.
Even good old Purify was butchered once Rational acuiqred the company. They immediately added their "enterprise" features making Purify slow and buggy in a course of a single release.
Rational is a company that threw software engineering back a decade by pimping their useless wares on unsuspecting IT managers and hapless devlopers.
Rational, just roll over and die! Pretty please!
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
$ mkdir mycvs
$ cvsup -d mycvs/ init
In eclipse, click Window->Open Perspective->other->CVS. Login to your sever.
Enjoy all the money you saved.
Now that I can tightly link my business and marketing with a new semantic oriented paradigm shift that's horizontally compatible with my vertical integration, I can finally think outside the box and my dynamicism will be prolific!
....
Nuh-uh. Your dynamicism is gonna be about the same, dude.
Unless, of course, you buy the optional "My Dynamicism" module from Rational
-kgj
-kgj
Ugh, I just witnessed an organization purchase a copy of Rational Rose XDE only to just watch it sit on the shelf for a few months. This was the second time this has happened to me. Rational products are over-priced for what they deliver, and the rational unified process is a consultant magnet.
------ Tim O'Brien
playing http://www.bullshitbingo.com/
playing:i tbingo/
http://www.perkigoth.com/home/kermit/stuff/bullsh
If my team was large enough to use and enterprice level Collaborative SVCS, I'd choose collabnet any day, their web based interface is very well written, intuitive and fast. But like Rational, PVCS... it's very expensive.
:]
I've used Scarab and subversion and both applications rock. Although scarab is quite alot more to set up, It's web based interface is way cleaner than bugzilla and easier for non-hackers to understand. The beauty of subversion is it's simplicity and it's ability to integrate with external systems via it's scriptability and `hooks` trigger framework.
BTW - I've been looking for an open source collaborative software development setup/framework/system that allows for integration of the version control system, the issue tracking system, document management... Anybody know of such a beast? Not the kind of thing one does on their spare time outside of their day job
JsD
BAD SLASHDOT!
BAD!
At the risk of being e-lynched, I can actually recommend Rational Rose RT. It does what it's supposed to do and does it reasonably well. In fact it's the closest thing I've seen to real Model-Driven-Development. Basically Rose RT is your whole IDE, and you only ever forward-engineer code, so no code-synching is required.
I work for Siemens Communications in the UK, and we've had one very successful development project with Rose RT. The claims of approx 80-90% code generation are actually true - Rose RT creates the structure & behaviour of your program, you write the rest.
It's aimed at embedded / real time development, so you are unlikely to use it to create a UI. The main downside with Rose RT is the memory footprint - we still have some worries about this because the previous development was not 'real time' as such, the program we developed had to pass messages around more than anything else. Deployment onto a phone which may require 'hard' real time may not be feasible.
Don't confuse Rose RT with Rational Rose though - Rose RT used to be called "ObjecTime", which Rational bought & then enhanced to make it look like Rose.
Interestingly, I was actually asked to investigate & recommend a "full lifecycle" Toolset/Suite for deployment in our engineering department...I opted for Rational, given our previous positive experiences with Rose RT & the fact that the Rational Suite is (allegedly) one of the few that really spans the whole development lifecycle. However from reading some of the responses in this thread I'm starting to think I might have made a mistake...
An AC wrote:
it sounds like some marketing droid came up with that article blurb.
Seems like about 90% of the time, the "submitter's" blurb for a Slashdot story is the first paragraph of the linked article, cut and pasted. (And surprise, surprise, that's exactly what happened here!) Sometimes you can tell because of pronoun usage ("we" instead of "they", etc.) and sometimes a particularly slimy submitter will "revise" a cut-n-pasted blurb to make it look like the submitter actually did write it.
Given that any story of sufficient interest probably has half a dozen duplicate submitters, I would think it would be possible to choose a submission that does not plagiarize the author of the story, but then again, I did some real journalism for awhile.
-- Old Man Kensey
Looking through the comments, it appears that there is exactly one reply that is positive about the advertised software. There are dozens of very negative reviews.
It seems as if this thinly-veiled marketing attempt has failed miserably.
Try finding decent online documentation for SWT.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It already has a Word plugin, you dumbass.
In fact, one of my major issues with the Rational suite is that last time I looked it was heavily reliant on Word.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
There is another way to look at such articles. It's about a well-known software compamy with a well-known line of business products using Eclipse in their new product.
So when I'm to push to the management Eclipse or another OS IDE or I will sure make a big deal out of it. The fact that the article is almost content-free and that Rational software is crap does not mean much is that context.
Psychotic Pacific Penumbra Apexed Concretions?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I worked as a student placement on RSA (Rational Software Architect) and RSM (Rational Software Modeler) last summer at IBM, two applications that I imagine are part of the "Atlantic" solutions. The core featureset for these tools had to do with UML modeling for large projects and having the ability to share and create such a model in a group setting. My job in particular was to test these applications for bugs.
On the whole, during the time when I was working there the project was reaching a high state of maturity, and the team was highly dedicated. While I'm not sure about the usefulness of the product itself, the development team was certainly cohesive and motivated to put out a top-notch software package.
Following this awful post, I would like to suggest the following feature: Let the readers mod the posts, rather than just the comments. For example, this post about Rational Bla Bla would get: -1 Redundant Advertisement.
Look at the GUI's that accompany the Rational products. Are they usable? Why should we care about their development methodologies? Why should we use their tools? Death to the bureaucracts!