IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software

Used by 58 people for 846 hours, 53 minutes and 35 seconds

IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software (RAD) is an integrated development environment (IDE), made by IBM's Rational Software division, for visually designing, constructing, testing, and deploying Web services, portals and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications.

Rational Application Developer includes code and visual editors for:

* Database connections and SQL
* Enterprise Generation Language
* HTML
* Java
* JavaServer Faces and JavaServer Pages
* UML
* Web services
* XML

It also has a built-in WebSphere Portal test environment and tight integration with other Rational tools, such as ClearCase version control and ClearQuest configuration management.

All Rational software products, including RAD and Rational Software Architect (RSA), are plugins that are built on top of a common framework, which itself consists of plugins that sit on top of the open-source Eclipse development platform. The first Rational product that you install also installs the common framework. When you install other Rational products, the existing framework is used and only product-specific plugins are installed. This technique is known as shell-sharing. Shell-sharing is enforced and cannot be deactivated.

Because RAD is Eclipse-based, it can take advantage of a vibrant market of third-party plugins for Eclipse, as well as plugins specifically for Rational tools.

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