Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Rational Application Developer

I have not posted to this blog for a while, and I can now explain why. Today, at the WebSphere Technical Conference in Vienna, we announced the upcoming availability of an open beta for the next major version of Rational Application Developer (RAD 7.5). Those of you who've read my previous posts (hi Mom!) will not be surprised by the themes we're focusing on for RAD 7.5; better support for the complete application development lifecycle, including refactoring operations and quickfixes that cover the complete Java EE programing model.

The RAD 7.5 beta also provides support for the WebSphere EJB3 feature pack, the beta for which is available now for WebSphere 6.1. The RAD support for EJB 3.0 allows us to really exploit annotation based programming models. Previous versions of the spec focused on deployment descriptors, and the matching RAD releases had advanced editors to support that. In RAD 7.5, the focus is on Java developers, and using the Java editor as a base - but extending the already powerful Eclipse editor by adding significant new function and capability to support developing an annotation based application.

The intent is simple; most developers creating applications for WebSphere are quite comfortable using Java, and we have a great Java editor in RAD/eclipse - so it's a mistake to force them to switch to a whole new environment (with wizards and graphical editors) when they want to define some aspect of server interaction (such as Web Services or EJBs). This is a natural extension to what the spec defines, but the way we're supporting that pattern within RAD is new, easy to use, and productive.

The other aspect that I'm thrilled about is just the fact that we're running an open beta, less than a year after we shipped the last major version of RAD. We're not done yet, and we have more good ideas that we're still implementing - but the code is great quality, and the performance is good... and this shows a commitment to delivering a rock solid, robust, and well performing RAD. The intent is to encourage developers to explore the product, and not feel concerned that they'll get in trouble if they try something non-standard or off the golden path.

I'm really pleased with the progress the team has made on RAD 7.5; this is going to be the best version of RAD we've ever delivered, and the open beta gives you a chance to see where we're at, comment on what you see, and help us refine the product to make it exactly what you need. You can sign up for the beta here, and there will be newsgroups available to report problems, ask questions, and give us your feedback.

Tim Francis

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

That´s GREAT ! I just can´t wait the new version of RAD, newest latest of EJB and WS are just great, do you know when the 7.5 will be finished?

Anonymous said...

Is it on top of eclipse 3.3?

Anonymous said...

Not only is it on top of eclipse 3.3, but the JVM that runs the workbench is IBMs J9 v1.6.0...

java version "1.6.0"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build pwi3260-20071105_01)
IBM J9 VM (build 2.4, J2RE 1.6.0 IBM J9 2.4 Windows XP x86-32 jvmwi3260-20071104
_14630 (JIT enabled)
J9VM - 20071104_014630_lHdSMR
JIT - r9_20071101_1822
GC - 20071031_AA)
JCL - 20071101_01

Anonymous said...

Is there websphere binding and extension annotation support as well? I like the idea of having annotation support, but would like to look at the results in gui form.

buveneswari said...

I am using RAD 7.5 can u please tell me how to work in it for designing an ejb project my mail id is buvani.suriyan@gmail.com
thanking you.
yours truly,
buveneswari.s

Unknown said...

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