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."

Comments

Full disclosure, please:

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell paid to have this shit story posted?!!!

Huh?

[YankeeInExile]

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 ___________________________."

Re:Huh?

[bcrowell]

• 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 ___________________________."

Sure, Atlantic is an enhancement to the the core Rational software solutions that works with Eclipse, an open framework for development team members.

In other words, if you're like me, you got up this morning and said to yourself, "Gosh, I really need some solutions to help unify my development team members. And not only that, I need to more tightly link my business, development, and operations organizations."

Of course, you might not have gotten up this morning and said that to yourself. If so, then it probably indicates that your business and development operations organizations are not sufficiently tightly linked to enable you to prioritize that mission, going forward, on a fully scaleable, integrated, enterprise-wide basis.

Anonymous...Rational employee

[gtt]

Sounds like some marketing droid sent in a press release anonymously.

Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!!!

Re:Yes, but

[stupidfoo]

Ughh... that makes me want to go and read some Microsoft white papers.

Re:Yes, but

[LDoggg_]

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!!!

Of course it does. However don't become disenfranchised. You must think outside the box to realize that this paradigm shift is only possible with our Enterprise Solution. It enables you to Improve productivity in code-centric, model-driven, and rapid application development envniroment. Thus creating a win-win situation.

Rational Sucks

[N8F8]

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.

Re:Rational Sucks

[jarich]

This blog entry by Grady Booch pretty much sums it up IMHO.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blo g_comments.jspa?blog=317&entry=65728

The guy built a client server system for his doorbell! And then, big surprise, it didn't work.

If this makes sense to you, you might like RUP... otherwise, try something simpler! :)

I've told this story from time to time in my public lectures and I've decided to retire this tale, but before I do, I'll preserve it for reference in my blog.

My wife and I designed and built a home a few years ago, and being an alpha geek I just had to fill it with all sorts of automated elements. I hired a contractor to pull the wires (he put about 5 miles of Cat 5 wires in the walls) but as CTO/CIO of the home, I installed the rest of the network. Shortly after I booted the house for the first time, we invited some friends over for dinner. They arrived at the appointed time, rang the doorbell - but we never heard it. They knocked on the door - and we didn't hear that either - so they finally called us on their cell phone, while standing at the front door.

My doorbell had crashed.

Now, doorbells have very simple use cases: you push the button, it rings a tone inside the home. However, my implementation of said doorbell was a bit more complex, and I failed my user base by having the bones of the underlying technology stick through. You see, the doorbell sends a signal to our PBX system, which I hacked to extract events (such as the doorbell being pressed). That event gets routed to an application server - running a non-Macintosh, non-Linux operating system, I might add - which has a deamon that intercepts various events (such as from the PBX, the security system, and so on) and in this case would send an event to the A/V subsystem, where a seasonally-appropriate and pleasant tone would sound through the home. Alas, I failed to use Rational's own tools (Purify in this case) and I had a memory leak in my application server. The solution was to reboot that server, which brought the doorbell back to life.

I have a very demanding customer (my wife) who really doesn't like to have my software lying around on the floor, and so she was at first annoyed and then amused at the incident. The good news is that I've ripped out the first implementation (I'm not saddled by legacy software here) and my doorbell now works as any good little doorbell should, with all the complexity hidden below the surface.

Yet another example of why the primary task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.

Re:Rational Sucks

[jgrahn]

[Grady Booch] Yet another example of why the primary task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.

And the cheapest and safest way by far to accomplish that is to use real simplicity. KISS.

Rose is the worst

[amightywind]

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.

Well...

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

I, for one, welcome out new...er...what the hell does Rational do again?

Rational tool documentation sucks!

[Kenneth Stephen]

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.

Good job Rational

[stratjakt]

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!

The article is pretty content-free

[winkydink]

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.

What the hell's going on here?

[The Dodger]

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.
..is for Don't!

What is the price for all this Free Software?

[museumpeace]

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 /.

Should Read...

[razmaspaz]

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)"

Re:When you see all the WTF comments

[stupidfoo]

Not all of us are developers. And plenty of those who are develoeprs work in MS shops. We don't all have time to keep track of every IDE and CVS out there. That's why a brief description should be present for posts like this.

Eclipse needs affordable UML plugin

[mikech@rbsgi]

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.

Snake Oil

[wheelbarrow]

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.

Rational Software is Terrible

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Now IBM/Rational the company that extols iterative development (RUP_ release this cruddy version of Rational Woes (renamed ;)) 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.

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.

I agree - Rational products suck.

[xwin]

During my software development carier which is not particularly long, ~15 years, I have used 4 Rational's products. In fact I am using one today. I can attest to the fact that all of their products are pretty bad. At least all products that I used. This was a fact 6 years ago and this is a fact today. Whenever company is using Rational's software, engineers always will have conversations at lunch about how bad that software is and who is the idiot that started using it in the first place.

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.

Throwing thousands of dollars down the drain...

[BigTimOBrien]

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.

Re:Sorry, I'd take collabnet over rational any day

[grimarr]

I think Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) does many of those things. It seems to be focused on Java projects, but it might work with other languages also.

I haven't used it, although I plan to look at it a bit someday.