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December 10, 2003

Application Development Tools

Architect for All Seasons

IBM Rational Rapid Developer v2003

by Nelson King

Continued from Page 1

The Architects at Work

In general, installing RRD is very easy. RRD operates in a Windows environment, but deploys software to any environment that supports Java. In this first release as an IBM product, RRD has improved support for WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database server, but also supports a wide variety of other server products. As with any IDE for n-tier development, set-ups with configurations involving application servers, Web servers, database servers, and client programs can become complex.

The main components of RRD, the "Architects," are integrated into the process of generating nearly all of the code for an application:

Application Architect might be dubbed "specification central" as it's where many of the options and parameters of an application are entered. Within the tabbed pages are layers upon layers of options, which many programmers will find a challenge to understand. (See Figure 1.)
Class Architect serves as a general access point to application objects (a class browser). More formally than most development systems, RRD incorporates data within the object-oriented model. Database elements (IBM DB2, Oracle 9i, Microsoft SQL Server, JDBC, and ODBC databases) fit squarely into the same modeling framework as the rest of the application development.
Site Architect and Page Architect produce most of the user interface for applications. The Site Architect is a design tool that visually displays the navigation of Web pages in a site. It's useful, but creating a large site page by page is laborious. I also found some problems with resizing and manipulating links between pages. The Page Architect is similar to many other HTML page designers, although not as detailed as some (Microsoft FrontPage).
Theme Architect and Style Repository work primarily in conjunction with the Page architect, and you use them to create graphical Web page themes.
Logic Architect provides access to most of the application's Java code. It doesn't have the kind of coding support found in Microsoft Visual Studio. Net or Borland JBuilder, but then RRD isn't about manual coding. Note that most debugging (other than compile errors) must be done in collaboration with another IDE, such as IBM WebSphere Studio.
Partition Architect is one of the most useful application deployment tools I've seen. The ability to create multiple deployment packages for different platforms while enforcing architectural best practices is a true enterprise-level benefit. Integration of the architect modules is smooth, but the user interface and development procedures could use some of the polish and streamlining found in IBM WebSphere Studio. This may be one of the long-term benefits of the IBM acquisition.

Delivering the Goods

Another benefit of the IBM association is very strong support for legacy systems (CICS/MVS, 3270 green screen, and mainframe connectivity). RRD uses its core modeling architects to incorporate other technologies in ways that don't require a great deal of programmer experience. Likewise, a Message Architect is provided to integrate with messaging systems. Given the importance of Web services, I'm not sure why RRD has a Message Architect but not a Web services Architect. In any case, Web services production is as automated as the rest of RRD and should be sufficient for at least basic Web services development.

As we are learning, n-tier Web application development is very difficult. It may be too much to expect that any IDE can generate perfect code for this environment. Yet RRD comes close. I would think that with careful choice of projects (not too much ground-breaking), the success rate of RRD applications should be much higher than many other IDEs. Still, although RRD is very good at generating basic application code, it doesn't remove the necessity of programmers capable of working "under the hood" — who understand in detail the code RRD is creating and how to modify or fix it. This requirement by no means outweighs its other benefits, such as enforcement of best practices and use of enterprise standard templates that can be shared with programmers who don't necessarily understand every nuance of Java, J2EE, and distributed applications.

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The world of enterprise software development is discovering the benefits of MDA (modularity, scalability, standards enforcing, and maintainability) and is ripe for a movement toward methodical ways to quickly produce applications. IBM Rational Rapid Developer is ready to be a key player in that movement. IBM deserves credit for its foresight.

Nelson King [nelsonking@earthlink.net] has written nine books on database application programming and spends much of his time in the trenches of enterprise software development.