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."
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
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
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.
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.