Monday, November 10, 2008
Considering the hefty price tag attached to RSA, is it worth the extra cost? Basically the short answer is: It depends. It depends on your role and your project.
The long answer requires a comparison of the Rational design/development tools. All the Rational v7.0 design/development tools are all based on Eclipse 3.2, so the only differences are the plug-ins and capabilities.
First, here’s a quick comparison of the design tools: Rational Software Modeler (RSM), Rational Systems Developer (RSD) and Rational Software Architect (RSA). RSA provides the most capabilities with plug-ins for all types of modeling and development. RSD contains modeling plug-ins and supports some development, but for only C/C++, J2SE and CORBA. If your project requires J2EE, Web Services, etc. RSD is not the tool for you. RSM provides the smallest set of capabilities; it has plug-ins for UML modeling only, with no development support.
Now, here’s a quick comparison of the development tools: Rational Web Developer (RWD), Rational Application Developer (RAD) and RSA. RWD is the entry level tool to build Web applications, Web Services or J2SE applications. Since it has no support for J2EE, this is not the tool for most enterprise IT teams. RAD is the full-blown development environment for building Web applications, Web Services, Java, J2EE and portal applications. RSA is the top of the line combination of all the capabilities of RAD with all the capabilities of RSM. So, you can basically design, model, forward and reverse engineer, build and test just about any Java/J2EE, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) or portal enterprise application.
OK, so much for the “quick” comparisons. RSA clearly stands out as the fully-loaded tool of choice. But, before rolling it out to the entire development team, consider the cost. RSA costs about as much as RSM and RAD combined. So, if your team is comprised of analysts, architect, team lead, developers, etc. most managers opt for RSM for analysts, RAD for developers and only get RSA licenses for architects and team leads who substantially contribute to both the design and application development.
Article written by: Cheryl Waldron, WebSphere and RAD Curricula Practice Owner, TEKsystems Partner via CyberFicient Technologies
Nice article!
Posted by poora on Friday, January 09, 2009
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