Rational Application Developer

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IBM® Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere® Software V8.0 provides optimized development for IBM middleware..

Helps Java™ developers rapidly design, develop, assemble, test, profile and deploy high quality Java/Java EE ™, Portal, Web/Web 2.0, OSGi, Web services and SOA applications.

  • Optimized for IBM WebSphere® Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal Server products and includes test environments for these products.
  • Introducing Rational Application Developer Standard Edition! – The core tools for WebSphere Application Server
  • Java EE 6 with JPA 2.0 and EJB 3.1 support for simpler development of enterprise applications
  • Build dynamic, easily manageable, modular applications with support for OSG
  • Accelerated Web 2.0 development capabilities to build Rich Internet Applications with Ajax, dojo and REST services
  • Add communications capabilities (e.g. Click to Call, Call Notification…) to your application with easy to add widgets and SIP 1.1 (JSR 289)
  • Build robust, scalable, and reusable Service Oriented Architectures with support for Service Component Architecture.
  • Extends the Eclipse 3.6 environment.
  • Increase team productivity with integrations to Rational Team Concert to improve collaborations no matter where your team is located.
  • Improve application quality with developer test and analysis tools to find and fix problems early.
  • Features a flexible installation process designed to provide developers with only the functions they need.
  • Applies visual portal development techniques to speed development.
  • Operating systems supported: Linux, Windows
  • Operating systems supported: ,

Features and Benefits

IBM® Rational® Application Developer

Rational Application Developer is the only Java IDE tool you need to design, develop, and deploy your applications. This page lists the features and benefits available in Rational Application Developer Standard Edition and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software

The following capabilities are available in both Rational Application Developer Standard Edition and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software.

Eclipse 3.6 Integration – Open source environment that brings integration and extensibility to the development environment

  • Includes all Eclipse 3.6 features and extends this functionality with visual development tools and IBM WebSphere® support

Productivity Enhancement Features

  • Flexible installation provides access to only the features you need
  • Cheat sheets for common development patterns
  • Application templates and template library
  • How-to and scenario-based tutorials
  • Getting started and installation guide
  • Content assist, validation quickfixes
  • Supports agile development with tools to refactor code, and unit testing

IBM WebSphere Support – Integrated unit test environments and Feature Pack Support

  • WebSphere Application Server unit test environments: v6.0 (remote), v.6.1, v7.0, v8.0 beta
  • Compatible WebSphere Portal Server unit test environments: v6.1, v7.0 beta
  • Supports both local and remote test servers
  • Support for WebSphere Feature Packs: Web 2.0, OSGi, JPA 2.0, SCA, XML, CEA, Web Services, EJB 3.0 Feature Packs
  • Support for building SIP 1.1 (JSR 289), GSMA OneAPI, Parlay X enabled applications with WebSphere Telecom Web Services Server Toolkit
  • WebSphere performance profiling and logging
  • Test environment for HTML and JSP files, servlets
  • EJB universal test client
  • Ant scripting and JUnit testing framework
  • TCP/IP Monitor to monitor requests and responses between a browser and an application server
  • Automated tools to manage server instances and server configurations, including automated creation and submission of wsadmin scripts
  • Test different run-time environments locally or remotely

Java Enterprise Edition Development – Comprehensive support for the JEE programming model accelerates EJB component development and testing

  • Concurrent support for J2EE 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 , Java EE 5 and Java EE 6 specifications
  • Support for Servlet 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.0 and JSP 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2
  • Java Server Faces 1.1, 1.2, 2.0
  • Support for EJB™ 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1
  • Java Persistence API (JPA) support 1.0, 2.0
  • Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.1, 2.2
  • Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) 1.1
  • Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6
  • Support for Java Message Service (JMS) and EJB Query Language
  • Support for JAR, EAR, WAR packaging
  • O/R Mapping (top-down and bottom up)
  • Generated EJB Test Client
  • EJB client JAR support to automate the creation of EJB clients
  • EJB snippet support to simplify generation of EJB client access code

Java Development – Build rich Java applications using a variety of visual editors, wizards and code generation, merging and re-factoring tools

  • Integrated Java Development Environment
  • Configurable Java Runtime Environment (JRE™)
  • Java Development Kit (JDK™), Version 6 support
  • Scrapbook for testing code snippets
  • Re-factoring

Web Services Development – Comprehensive Web services and SOA development tools simplify and automate the process of building WS-I compliant, interoperable Web services applications

  • Web services wizards to accelerate Web services development
  • Support for Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC), Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS 2.2), Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB 2.2), SOAP 1.1 and 1.2, SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ 1.3), UDDI 2.0 and v3, WSDL 1.1
  • Support for Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) and SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)
  • Create, validate and detect WS-I compliant Web services
  • Web services discovery based on WSIL
  • Discover and publish services to the UDDI Business Registry
  • Create or transform Web services from existing artifacts, such as Java beans, and EJB components
  • Build artifacts by wrapping in SOAP and describing in WSDL
  • WSDL editor
  • Develop Web services client application from samples
  • Deploy and test Web services into the WebSphere Application Server or Tomcat test environments
  • Web services Explorer
  • Process guidance for developing SOA applications

Web 2.0 Development – Features to aid the development of responsive Rich Internet Applications using the latest development and debugging tools

  • Ajax development with Dojo Toolkit and IBM extensions. Includes code assist, validation and refactoring support
  • JavaScript Editor with code assist, validation, refactoring
  • Support for REST (JAX-RS) services
  • Create JAX-RPC style services to access server side artifacts, through web remoting interfaces
  • Supports JSON and XML data interchange
  • Integrate ATOM and RSS feeds
  • Integration with Firebug JavaScript debugger

Web Development – RAD tools and wizards bring all aspects of Web development into a common interface and enable developers with diverse technical backgrounds, and even those unfamiliar with Java™, to quickly build rich, data-driven applications

  • JavaServer™ Faces support: JSF reference implementation, JSF components and visual tools
  • JSF-based report viewing component for embedding reports into Web applications
  • Build JSF custom components
  • Integrate 3rd party JSF libraries into Page Designer
  • Web Site Designer to visually manage and analyze Web sites
  • Integrated visual page designer with round-trip raw edit ability
  • JSP™ and servlet wizards
  • Struts 1.2, 1.3 support
  • Templates and samples
  • Support for HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CHTML, WML, Struts and visual custom tags
  • Page Designer with round-trip raw edit capability for WYSIWYG layout of JSP pages

Portal development – Visual portlet an portal development tools and a WebSphere Portal unit test environment for the development and testing of both individual portlets and entire portal applications.

  • Visual portal application development and editing of the themes and skins that control their appearance
  • Compatible WebSphere Portal Server unit test environments: v6.1, v7.0 beta
  • Integrated support for JSF and the Struts framework
  • Business portlet development using IBM WebSphere Portal Application Integration (SAP, Seibel)
  • Portlet templates
  • Support for IBM Portlet API and the JSR 168 and JSR 286 standard portlet API

XML Development – Comprehensive tools for creating, editing and transforming XML documents and integrating relational data and XML

  • XML, XML schemas tools
  • XML authoring tools – XML editor, DTD editor, XML schema editor
  • XML transformation tools: XML-to-XML mapping editor, XSLT generator, XSL trace editor
  • XSL editor
  • Xpath wizard

The following capabilities are only available in Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software WebSphere Adapter Support – Tools Supporting development adapters for third-party products

  • SAP
  • PeopleSoft Enterprise
  • Siebel
  • Oracle E-Business Suite
  • JD Edwards

Team Development – Integration with IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational ClearCase® enables a wide range of change management operations to be performed directly from within your development environment, provides an integrated view of projects and increases both collaboration and team productivity

  • Rational Team Concert Integration
    • Collaborative Debugging
    • Share code coverage results
  • Pluggable version control repositories
  • Adaptors for Concurrent Versions System
  • Adaptors for Rational ClearCase
  • RUP® Developer Configuration

Code Quality, Testing and Deployment

  • Code review (Static Analysis): Includes over 200 predefined rules for coding guidelines and best practices. Provides ‘Quick Fix’ suggestions and allows for customization of rules, via rules templates
  • Line Level coverage to track execution statistics of your lines of code
  • Enhanced runtime analysis tools: memory leak detection, thread lock detection, user defined probes, code coverage

Code Visualization for Java and EJB to visualize and edit Java and Java EE components

  • UML class diagram editor for Java classes and interfaces and EJBs
  • UML views of data tables and enhanced diagram support
  • UML sequence diagrams of method bodies