IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software (RAD) is an Eclipse-based IDE, made by IBM's Rational Software division, for visually designing, constructing, testing, and deploying Web services, portals, and Java Enterprise Edition applications.
Overview
IBM Rational Application Developer is an integrated development environment that helps Java software developers design, develop, and deploy their applications. It contains specialized wizards, editors, and validators for a variety of technologies:
Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE): This architecture is used to build distributed Web and enterprise applications. Java EE applications include: Enterprise Java beans (EJB) applications for distributed, secure applications with transactional support, Java Persistence API (JPA) applications to access persistent data, and JavaServer Pages (JSP) or JavaServer Faces (JSF) for developing presentation logic.
Web services: A Web service is a self-contained, self-describing, modular application that can be published, located, and invoked across the Internet. Web service tools enable software developers to discover existing Web services for integration, create Web services from existing artifacts or from Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files, and to deploy Web services to a variety of environments.
Service Component Architecture (SCA): SCA enables software reuse by assembling a set of services into a composite application. SCA development tools provide graphical wiring of components to form composite services, associate protocol bindings and quality of service intents to SCA components, and package SCA assets for deployment.
Extensible Markup Language (XML): XML is a generic language that can be used to describe any kind of content in a structured way. XML is used extensively to create Web services. XML tools include DTD, XSL, schema, and mapping editors.
Java EE Connector (J2C): J2C tools enable applications to access operations and data on enterprise information systems such as CICS or IMS. Wizards assist with file importing, data mapping, and the creation of Java classes and methods to access data.
Web application: Web applications range from Web sites, to complex applications that use JSF to access data, or Rich Internet applications that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). The workbench includes wizards, editors, and palettes to assist with the creation and deployment of Web applications.
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IBM Rational Application Developer includes tools to improve code quality. A Java profiling tool helps to analyze an application's performance, memory usage, and threading problems. A software analysis tool identifies patterns and antipatterns in application code, and compares code to coding standards.
To manage source code, a development team can configure IBM Rational Application Developer to work with a source code repository system. The product ships with connectors to IBM Rational ClearCase for source control and IBM Rational ClearQuest for defect management. It also ships with a Rational Team Concert client that can be used for both source control and defect management.
The workbench includes tools for deploying an application to a local or remote server. It contains test environments for IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal. It also supports Apache Tomcat. Using these tools, a software developer can test their application locally before publishing it to a production server. Cloud computing capability is provided for the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and the IBM Workload Deployer.
Because IBM Rational Application Developer is Eclipse-based, it can support the third-party plug-ins for Eclipse, as well as plug-ins specifically for Rational tools.
Source: Wikipedia
