Rational Software set to roll out rapid development tool

Computerworld - IBM's Rational Software division this week will announce a rapid application development (RAD) tool that's designed to reduce the complexity of building enterprise-class Java applications.

Rational declined to discuss the product's name, price or shipment date when it previewed the tool at IBM's developerWorks Live conference last month in New Orleans. But today the Lexington, Mass.-based unit will disclose that IBM Rational Rapid Developer is due for release next month and will sell for $5,995.

The tool goes beyond traditional RAD offerings in its support for visual-model-driven development and the Unified Modeling Language (UML), its use of prebuilt patterns for building scalable multitier applications, and its ability to simplify integration with existing systems, said Arun Gupta, chief technologist of enterprise applications at Rational.

Gupta said the tool, which Rational acquired last year from NeuVis Inc. in Shelton, Conn., can generate about 90% of the code for Java applications, leaving only a small percentage of business logic to be written by developers.

Steven Edwards, a senior manager at McLean, Va.-based BearingPoint Inc., said a team of developers working on new claims software for the insurance industry was able to automatically generate 65% to 70% of the application code with Rational Rapid Developer. The tool also helped the team cut development time by 40%, he said.

The application's size and the need to quickly get it to market prompted the development team to use the model-driven tool, Edwards said. "You can maintain consistency in your development standards, so when you make changes to your code, it will propagate through all your classes," he noted.

But how great an impact the Rational product will have among corporate developers remains unclear. Thomas Murphy, an analyst at Meta Group Inc., said developers are looking for tools that can ease the difficulty of building Java applications. But, he said, they will have to overcome fears that visual-model-driven development approaches won't scale or produce code that can be maintained.

Adoption of model-driven RAD tools has been slow because the products are just beginning to mature, said John Meyer, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. But Meyer predicted that the adoption rate will pick up as developers realize that their efficiency will be limited unless they start to rely on these types of tools to generate application plumbing code.

Rational will also introduce an automated software testing tool that is due by the end of next month and will sell for $2,995. The company also plans to announce enhancements to its XDE Professional design and development environment, which will now be called IBM Rational XDE Developer. New features include a debugging capability that will let users see application runtime errors and create UML models, plus integration of the Rational PurifyPlus runtime analysis tool.