Rational Software Architect


Rational Software Architect is a modeling and development environment that uses the Unified Modeling Language for designing architecture for C++ and Java EE applications and web services. Rational Software Architect is built on the Eclipse open-source software framework and includes capabilities focused on architectural code analysis, C++, and model-driven development with the UML for creating applications and web services.

Overview

Rational Software Architect is a family of three products:
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.
  4. # Forward transformations go from:
  5. ## UML to Java
  6. ## UML to C#
  7. ## UML to C++
  8. ## UML to EJB
  9. ## UML to WSDL
  10. ## UML to XSD
  11. ## UML to CORBA Interface Description Language
  12. ## UML to structured query language -based logical data models as supported by IBM Rational Data Architect software.
  13. # Reverse transformations go from
  14. ## Java to UML
  15. ## C++ to UML.
  16. ##.NET to UML
  17. Includes all of the capabilities of Rational Application Developer
  18. Enables model management for parallel development and architectural re-factoring, e.g., split, combine, compare and merge models and model fragments.
  19. 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, 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.
Since 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.

History

has a long history in application modeling, beginning in the early 1990s with the work of Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson. They combined competing modeling approaches to form what eventually became the Unified Modeling Language.
Rational Software's first visual modeling and development tool was Rational Rose, a stand-alone modeling tool that integrates at the application programming interface level with third-party Integrated Development Environments to support a variety of programming languages and other implementation technologies.
While Rational Rose was an important step in bringing Model-driven development closer to practicing software developers, it was found that only a small fraction of developers used modeling on a routine basis. A key problem was identified - developers didn't like to leave their IDE. They wanted visual modeling to be integrated—not with their IDE, but rather inside their IDE.
Rational responded to this need in 2002 with Rational XDE software, providing an extended development environment for the next generation of programming technologies emerging at the time: Java and Microsoft.NET. IBM Rational XDE was characterized as the next generation of IBM Rational Rose — not a new version of it, and not necessarily a replacement for Rose. However, with each addition of a tool or capability came another point-to-point integration requirement. As more and more capabilities were added, Rational began to reach the practical limits of this style of tool integration.
For the next-generation MDD products, it was only natural to build additional model-driven development functions on top of Eclipse to form a more complete MDD tool. IBM Rational Software Architect, IBM Rational Software Modeler and IBM Rational Systems Developer are the result of these changes, transforming the silos that previously defined modeling, development and code analysis into an integrated and unified design and development experience. RSA now co-exists with IBM Rational Rhapsody and several other products, with the two mentioned being the major MDD solutions within Rational.

Benefits

The benefits of using Rational Software Architect include: