There have been some exciting developments recently in Rational-land on the subject of SOA – most newsworthy perhaps, was the release in early December of the Rational desktop tools v7.0, advertised as “putting the ‘A’ in SOA”.
For those not familiar with the Rational desktop tools, they are built on Eclipse and include:
- Application Developer for WebSphere Software , featuring an integrated development environment for developing SOA, Java and portal applications.
- Software Architect, for model-driven development of SOA, J2EE and portal applications. New models are featured for SOA.
- Software Modeller, a visual modelling tool for architects, systems analysts and designers to ensure specifications, architectures and designs are clearly defined based on the Unified Modeling Language (v2.1).
- Systems Developer, a systems design and development tool for building hardware and software systems. This product adds Systems Modelling Language (SysML) support.
- Functional Tester, for functional and regression testing.
- Manual Tester, for manual test authoring and execution.
- Method Composer, now has an SOA plug-in, which enables the Rational Unified Process to provide process guidance for SOA governance.
Grady Booch, one of the original Three Amigos, held a live, on-line developerWorks chat on December 7, 2006 on the V7 release of IBM Rational desktop tools, SOA and Eclipse (read the transcript) which provides some insight into the value proposition of this release from one of our thought leaders.
So I’m looking for more great things to be coming in the realm of SOA, and look forward to sharing them with you.
