• By Steven Hays
• Published 07/4/2012

You may have heard about the Rational Application Developer, a product of IBM. The IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere is the software that provides optimised team development of the enterprise Java applications. With the help of this software, tasks like designing, developing, testing and analysing profiles and deploying robust and high-quality Java EE/Java, Web 2.0, portal, OSGi, mobile and SOA applications becomes a lot easier for the developers.

• With mobile and web development: This software reduces the time for delivering high-quality web applications with best of the breed visual development tools for the server side/client side mobile and web applications
• Enterprise services development: This software helps in building and assembling robust, reusable, and scalable fine or coarse grained service for accessing enterprise data
• Quick development and testing: WebSphere application developer provides integrated and optimised support for the newest IBM WebSphere Portal Server, WebSphere Application Server for making it easier and faster to iteratively test, develop, profile, debug and deliver code
• Team quality and collaboration: This software enables better team collaboration for improving productivity and infusing application quality in the entire development cycle with the various developer analysis and test tools for finding and fixing problems a lot early
• Cloud computing: This software helps leverage secure and scalable private cloud systems with the IBM Workload Deployer for quick, easy and repeated creation of applications environments

What are the features and benefits?

With the Rational Application Developer, you won’t need any other IDE for designing, developing and deploying your applications. You will get the following capabilities in both the Rational Application Developer Standard Edition as well as the WebSphere Software.

Eclipse 3.6 Integration – this is an open source environment which brings extensibility and integration to the whole development environment. This also includes all the features of Eclipse 3.6 and extends the functionality with the visual development tools as well as support of IBM WebSphere.

The productivity enhancement features:

• The flexible installation will provide you access to the features that you need
• There will also be cheat sheets for the regular development patterns
• It comes with template library and application templates
• There are scenario-based and how-to tutorials
• This comes with a guide for installation and getting started
• You will get validation quick fixes as well as content assist
• It supports agile development with various tool for refactoring codes as well as unit testing

IBM WebSphere Support – Feature Pack Support and Integrated environment for unit tests:

• It has WebSphere Application Server development: Liberty profile and v8.5, v8.0, v7.0 and v.6.1
• WebSphere Portal development: v8.0 and v7.0
• Supports for the WebSphere Feature packs: Web Services, CEA, XML, SCA, JPA 2.0, OSGi, Web 2.0, and EJB 3.0 Feature Packs
• WebSphere performance logging and profiling
• Supports required for building GSMA OneAPI, SIP 1.1 (JSR 289) as well as Parlay X enabled applications with the WebSphere Telecom Web Services Server Toolkit
• TCP/IP Monitor for monitoring responses and requests between a browser and an application server
• Automated tools for managing server configurations and server instances which includes automated

When you are learning about the Rational Application Developer, you may also want to know more about WebSphere installation for complete overall knowledge.

Author Bio:

Steven Hayes is a server administrator with years of experience. He offers a brief overview of what WebSphere application developer is all about.