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At the Rational Software Development User Conference yesterday, IBM (NYSE: IBM) revealed its plans for new capabilities expected to be available in the IBM Software Development Platform by the end of 2004. According to the company, the new software development technologies will help organizations automate their development activities.
Mike Devlin, General Manager of IBM's Rational division, discussed the new capabilities during a conference call yesterday, pointing to examples of companies that have gained a competitive advantage by embracing a business-driven approach to software development.
Through business-driven development, Devlin argued, organizations can improve their ability to achieve greater value from all of their assets, including business processes, legacy systems, middleware, software components and other intellectual property.
"By utilizing the IBM Software Development Platform to tightly link their business, development and operations teams, clients can optimize business value, accelerate software development, and better leverage runtime platforms and IBM middleware," Devlin said.
Deeper, Richer Integration
Many of the new capabilities in the IBM Software Development Platform are based on Eclipse 3.0 technologies, which are designed to provide a vendor-neutral framework for sharing development artifacts.
These artifacts include requirements, models, code, test cases and defects. The Eclipse framework is designed to make it easier for vendors, including IBM, to integrate their products. It can also provide role-based user interfaces that enable team members to work in an environment that is tailored for their unique needs.
The new IBM Rational design and construction technologies will support JavaServer Faces, Service Data Objects and UML 2.0 modeling.
All of these new Rational capabilities are based on the Eclipse Hyades integrated test, trace and monitoring environment.
Enhanced Distributed Development
By offering new Wide Area Network client support and monitoring and administration capabilities within IBM software configuration management technologies, IBM is trying to help clients capture, control and manage software changes and assets from many development locations.
This strategy is said to help organizations control operational costs, reduce mistakes caused by lack of communication, and maintain a secure development organization.
The complete IBM Software Development Platform provides just about everything individual developers and teams need to build, integrate, extend, modernize and deploy software and software-based systems.
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