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Rational Atlantic Eclipse Based Solutions 128

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."
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Rational Atlantic Eclipse Based Solutions

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:37PM (#11311270)
    Who the hell paid to have this shit story posted?!!!
  • wow (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    it sounds like some marketing droid came up with that article blurb. Sorry, but that's what it sounds like.

    • (That's ~ in the mathematical sense of "approximately", not the alternate programming usage of "bitwise NOT".)

      An AC wrote:

      it sounds like some marketing droid came up with that article blurb.

      Seems like about 90% of the time, the "submitter's" blurb for a Slashdot story is the first paragraph of the linked article, cut and pasted. (And surprise, surprise, that's exactly what happened here!) Sometimes you can tell because of pronoun usage ("we" instead of "they", etc.) and sometimes a particularly slim

  • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by YankeeInExile ( 577704 ) * on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:38PM (#11311278) Homepage Journal

    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 ___________________________."

    • Is it possible to have article summaries that at least clue intelligent people

      Especially when you have code words like "Atlantic" and "Eclipse"--I thought this was a science story at first.

      • Indeed. When I first saw the headline, I thought it was going to tell me a sane way to get out on the ocean to watch the moon pass in front of the sun.
    • Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:09PM (#11311606) Homepage
      • 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.

      • 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."

        When I got up this morning, I said to myself, "The only solution I need is the volatile oils of ground coffee beans in water." Which may not be a solution, but a suspension. Or just a mixture. I'm a codewriter, not a chemical engineer! Ask m

    • Don'y you worry about Rational Atlantic, let me worry about _________.

      Apologies to futurama

    • I just learned today what eclipse is. A co-worker introduced it as if it was the best thing since sliced bread. Any opinions from the slashdot crowd?
      • It's very nice, probably the most popular Java IDE right now. The Mono IDE borrows a lot of its looks and functionality from it, I've been told (nothing wrong with that of course, the Source is Open). Since Eclipse is so easy to write plugins, there are also people using it for many other languages, Python for instance.

        I was browsing an engineering magazine at a friends house and was surprised to read that it is appearently becoming very popular for embedded development.

        One of the Gang of Four authors wor
  • by gtt ( 9902 ) *
    Sounds like some marketing droid sent in a press release anonymously.
  • Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:41PM (#11311321)
    "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 (Score:4, Funny)

      by stupidfoo ( 836212 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:47PM (#11311381)
      Ughh... that makes me want to go and read some Microsoft white papers.
    • Re:Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)

      by LDoggg_ ( 659725 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:00PM (#11311510) Homepage
      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.

      • You must think outside the box to realize that this paradigm shift is only possible with our Enterprise Solution.

        BTW, just so everyone knows, my friends and I have decided that the new "thinking outside the box" for 2005 is actually "thinking inside the box". Actually "thinking outside the box" is so...2004. :)

  • Rational Sucks (Score:3, Informative)

    by N8F8 ( 4562 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:43PM (#11311342)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jarich ( 733129 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:48PM (#11311388) Homepage Journal
      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 [ibm.com]

      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 (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jgrahn ( 181062 )
        [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.

    • I've been involved with projects that used ClearCase and it worked fine. It takes more effort to set up and maintain than some other tools, but it's also very powerful.

      Also, ClearCase LT != Rational. Just because you had a bad experience with one of their tools doesn't mean they all suck. I've used RAD (Rational Application Developer, based on Eclipse3) and it's a really nice IDE. In my opinion it's the Visual Studio of the Java/J2EE world, and maybe better. Some of Rational's products are more polish
      • We had two developer who had used prior incarnations of ClearCase but since our needs were very basic, overcoming the installation and administration hurdle would have been too great.
        • That about sums it up. I don't love ClearCase (I used to be a raving hater, so simple apathy is a huge improvement), but for large, complex projects, there aren't a lot of alternatives. Apparently, writing a version control system isn't easy. I had a lot of hope for Stellation [eclipse.org], but development seems to have faltered.
      • Also, ClearCase LT != Rational. Just because you had a bad experience with one of their tools doesn't mean they all suck.

        IMHO, ClearCase is The Rational Tool Which Does Not Suck. And Purify, of course! Rose, Requisite Pro and ClearQuest, on the other hand ... just thinking of them makes me mad.

    • You got that right. The software development company at which I work dumped Rational for CVS about a year ago (for both monetary and usability reasons), and we haven't regretted it for a second. Their tools were much more of a hindrance than a help. Plus we can't read our old source code change histories because we don't have a Clearcase license any more. Vendor lock-in sucks when you're entrusting your precious source code to a company like that.
    • Thats nothing. We just spent three years, trying to purge the whole company of this Clear-*@#$%&. You consider yourself lucky it never got installed. On the other hand, subversion could be hardly called a worthy replacement as much as I wish it would be to the contrary.

      I have just two questions on the ClearCase software engineers: "How the @#$% can a database get full?" and "What good for is a version control system, where you need to delete old versions to be able to create new ones?"

    • I always considered it significant that the first versions of Rational Rose were the buggiest pieces of software I had ever seen. Obviously not practicing what they preach.

  • Who else read the title to this and wondered if it were something having to do with predicting tsunamis in the Atlantic Ocean or about watching solar eclipses from the Atlantic Ocean?
  • Rose is the worst (Score:3, Informative)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:45PM (#11311363) Journal

    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.

    • Agreed, Rational Rose is a gigantic piece of crap. I don't think I have ever seen so many dialogs to do simple tasks in my entire life. Does every little thing need a stupid dialog?
    • Exactly right; it is a tool derived from those who can't design, to be used by those who can't code, and used to support two lies:

      1. You can find out what the (L)USERs want by asking them.

      2. A toolset costing, say USD 5000 per seat can turn village idiots into competant developers.

      The belief that you can buy a toolset and 30 youngsters (1-2 years post graduation) and have a development team is the mark of the Pointy Haired Manager!
  • Well... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Blue-Footed Boobie ( 799209 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:47PM (#11311385)
    I, for one, welcome out new...er...what the hell does Rational do again?
  • I know that /. isn't a general news site so maybe the submission pool is a little low but what is this shit? How can this be posted but the story about the government buying up columnists to generate public press is nowhere to be found? It isn't technology news but maybe YRO or something.
  • by Kenneth Stephen ( 1950 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:54PM (#11311447) Journal

    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.

  • by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:54PM (#11311454) Journal
    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!
    • I don't see the synergy.
    • 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!

      Nuh-uh. Your dynamicism is gonna be about the same, dude.

      Unless, of course, you buy the optional "My Dynamicism" module from Rational ....

      -kgj
    • Q. How do you keep track of all the clichés?
      A. It's like herding cats. I walk the walk and talk the talk.

      Q. Did incomprehensibility come naturally to you?
      A. I wasn't wired that way, but it became mission-critical as I strategically focused on my go-forward plan.

      Q. Is your work difficult?
      A. It isn't rocket science. It isn't brain surgery. When you drill down to the granular level, it's basic blocking and tackling.

      Q. How do you stay ahead of others in the buzzword industry?
      A. Net-net, my value proposi
  • Good lord, why can't the marketroids keep coopting every useful word?

    Or is Rational now selling liquids containing dissolved substances?

  • regarding major development tooling it makes you wonder just how technically clued up people really are around here.
    • 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.
      • I appreciate that not all here are developers, and I would agree with you if say the article was discussing the upcoming developments in MagicDraw and its closer integration with SharpDevelop that some clarifying would be required, but we are talking about some of the biggest names in the business here.
        • As someone who is a developer and has years of experience with Rational's tools.. I think one would have to be fairly ignorant to *NOT* have multiple, repeated WTF moments when dealing with this company and its products.

          It may be a big name. It may have a lot of features. It may still suffer from critical design flaws, internal politics, outrageous licensing and maintenance fees, inscrutable buzz-speak, and payroll-draining maintainability.
          • While I have to agree with your assessment of a lot of Rational's products, I think the OP was referring to Eclipse rather than Rational.
            Eclipse has been open sourced since 2001. Many of the plug-ins are GPL/CPL.
            Many /.'ers may not be developers but most seem to have a OSS bent, or at least they used to.
            • Ah. I keep running across Eclipse because I find the idea of good IDE on Linux intriguing. I've developed in Java in the past, so I've used Borland's Jbuilder on Linux and know what I'm missing when I'm not using it.

              I keep hearing about Eclipse, and how wonderful it is to have all these plugins. I'm especially interested for C++ use. However, I have not really used what I would call a "full, polished" version of it. Such a beast seems rather hard to find. Even the special bundled version with Redhat Enter
  • by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Monday January 10, 2005 @01:59PM (#11311499) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • by The Dodger ( 10689 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:00PM (#11311505) Homepage

    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!

  • We're looking at deploying Borland or Atlantic at our shop; I'm hoping for Borland Together, frankly, because I'm used to Borland products and their MDA tool looks a lot more mature. Anyone out there have first-hand knowledge to help compare and contrast? Demos and tinkering on a test box just doesn't answer enough questions for me.
    • For modeling/design go with Borland. Together is a far superior tool in my opinion. The round trip engineering is a joy. Rose I have always found to be a clunky tool, not very intuitive and was bound to specific versions of the JDK (not sure if that was still the case). Despite its monsterous cost when it was a standalone company Together brought a much more thought out and integrated feel to the whole design/develop/test/profile/deploy cycle than rational ever managed.
  • by museumpeace ( 735109 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:03PM (#11311537) Journal
    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 /.
  • 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)"
  • 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.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      There is plug-in called Eclipse Modeling Framework ( http://www.eclipse.org/emf). Not sure exactly how it works, since I don't use it directly -- it's a prereq for IBM Java/Com bridge (http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/dtjcb) which I do use.
    • Sigh, this is a good point....

      I have been given the task to locate a UML and a C# plugin for Eclipse. Yes plugins are easy to find (I can Google too, so don't start). But finding a free and good plugin is a different story. For that matter just finding out the pros and cons of any plugin seams rather difficult.

      In my case the plugins I want would be (ideally) free but most importantly widely used and hopefully the better ones. I need to install them in Computer Science labs so I prefer a OS solution

  • Snake Oil (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wheelbarrow ( 811145 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:08PM (#11311579)
    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.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:27PM (#11311827)
    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.
  • by xwin ( 848234 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:32PM (#11311880)
    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.

    • "You know, the guy who wrote Effective XXX series."

      Never realized that Scott Meyers makes his living in the adult industry now.

    • absolutely right! Rational-sourced products were the worst I had the misfortune to be forced to work with. (I say that because the tools they bought from real development houses - Purify, Quantify, Clearcase) are the best.

      What's really galling is that the company that makes software to improve software quality is guilty of the worst quality control. You'd think they could use their own tools... but then, thinking about the hell that is UML, they probably do.
  • As a developer who works almost daily with Eclipse and various Rational products (Clearcase, Clearquest, etc), I can say that the passion with which I hate Clearcase knows no bounds. It's a classic case of someone building a hammer, then going looking for nails. I find it funny that no one will own up to who in our organization decided to license the entire Rational suite for our entire organization without having any of the software groups pilot test it first.

    I also find it funny that the curious Fran
  • Anyone else who got burned by using anything from that company? Rational Rose was a disaster and the quickest path to failure for any reasonable sized sofware project that I've seen. I don't even understand how it is supposed to help you manage complexity. It's all about silly pictures that have no compiler validation (except for class diagrams which aren't that complex to handle without Rose) and often over time become work of pure fiction.

    Even good old Purify was butchered once Rational acuiqred the com


  • $ mkdir mycvs

    $ cvsup -d mycvs/ init

    In eclipse, click Window->Open Perspective->other->CVS. Login to your sever.

    Enjoy all the money you saved.

  • by BigTimOBrien ( 203674 ) on Monday January 10, 2005 @02:50PM (#11312097) Homepage
    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.
  • If my team was large enough to use and enterprice level Collaborative SVCS, I'd choose collabnet any day, their web based interface is very well written, intuitive and fast. But like Rational, PVCS... it's very expensive.

    I've used Scarab and subversion and both applications rock. Although scarab is quite alot more to set up, It's web based interface is way cleaner than bugzilla and easier for non-hackers to understand. The beauty of subversion is it's simplicity and it's ability to integrate with external
    • I think Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org/ [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.
      • Actually, Scarab (http://scarab.tigris.org) uses Maven under the hood. It also uses Velocity templates and many other really cool Apache hacks.

        I checked out Trak and it looks nice. Cool that it integrates with Subversion. However, the issue tracking component is really very generic when compared to Scarab.

        Although Scarab is missing a few key features (thanks to Collabnet hiding commits of these features to tigris.org) it is still very usable. The only thing I see with it is the customization workflows for
  • Psychotic Pacific Penumbra Apexed Concretions?
  • Following this awful post, I would like to suggest the following feature: Let the readers mod the posts, rather than just the comments. For example, this post about Rational Bla Bla would get: -1 Redundant Advertisement.

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