IBM Rational Software Architect - Overview

Overview

IBM Rational Software Architect become a family of three products:

• Rational Software Architect: Provides and integrated design and development tool with UML Support.
• Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software: A platform optimized for SOA, JEE and Websphere applications.
• Rational Software Architect Design Manager : Collaboration tool to share and manage design information.

Rational Software Architect version 7.5 includes the following capabilities:

1. Built on Eclipse version 3.4
2. Supports UML version 2.1
3. Supports model-to-code and code-to-model transformations.
   1. Forward transformations go from:
      1. UML to Java
      2. UML to C#
      3. UML to C++
      4. UML to EJB
      5. UML to WSDL
      6. UML to XSD
      7. UML to CORBA Interface Description Language (IDL)
      8. UML to structured query language (SQL)-based logical data models as supported by IBM Rational Data Architect software.
   2. Reverse transformations go from
      1. Java to UML
      2. C++ to UML.
      3. .NET to UML
4. Includes all of the capabilities of IBM Rational Application Developer
5. Enables model management for parallel development and architectural re-factoring, e.g., split, combine, compare and merge models and model fragments.
6. Provides visual construction tools to expedite software design and development

It also has integrations with other Rational tools, such as ClearCase version control and ClearQuest configuration management.

All Rational software products, including Rational Software Architect (RSA), are engineered as plugins that sit on top of the open-source Eclipse development platform. Installing Rational Software Architect gives the developer the option to either install RSA on top of an existing Eclipse v3.2 installation, or to install a new Eclipse v3.2 instance.

Because RSA is Eclipse-based, it can take advantage of the market of third-party plugins for Eclipse, as well as plugins specifically for Rational tools.