IBM Rational Software Architect

IBM Rational Software Architect is a flexible, extensible, easy to use platform for delivering high quality architectures.

• New! Sketching a simple and informal way to capture ideas and thoughts that can quickly kickstart a project and be transformed later on to formal architectures
• Manage risk, quality, and change more effectively; flush out and better understand requirements; enable more accurate planning and estimating
• Maintain more effective control of architecture and delivery outcomes
• Effectively manage and re-use solution architectures and architectural building blocks
• Manage evolution of, and adherence to, design contracts as development is carried out by geographically and organizationally distributed teams
• Focus on creative aspects of solutions and avoid mundane, repetitive work
• Leverage scalable infrastructure services with access to the Cloud
• Quickly create custom factory solutions based upon your own domain examples, using exemplar-driven authoring tools. Use domain specific languages to represent your unique problem and solution domains. Automate development with Patterns Based Engineering
• Enhance the capabilities of Rational Software Architect with various extensions for a variety of problem and industry domains
• Additional integrations with the IBM Rational software delivery platform include IBM Rational Team Concert
• Open and highly extensible to adapt to your needs. Powered by Eclipse 3.6, features are optionally installable and configurable at a fine-grained level to expose only the tooling capabilities you truly need

Features

• General modeling with the industry's most robust support for UML 2.2 and a configurable modeling environment that can be tailored to expose "just enough" UML based on role, model, life-cycle phase, and current task
• Business modeling with BPMN 2
• Requirements integration, with end-to-end traceability and impact analysis
• Model analyses and metrics; extensible query and analysis frameworks
• Model reporting with BIRT
• Rich SCM integrations, model compare-merge, and extensible team modeling framework
• Rapidly develop custom software factories
  • Quickly create UML-based domain-specific modeling languages tailored to your problem and solution domains
  • Use graphical mapping tools to quickly development model-to-model transformations
  • Use exemplar-driven pattern capture tools combined with a rich JET authoring environment to quickly develop model-to-text/code transformations
• Lifcycle integrations
  • IBM InfoSphere Data Architect
  • IBM Rational Requisite Pro
  • IBM Rational Asset Manager
  • IBM Rational Team Concert
  • IBM Rational ClearCase
  • IBM Rational ClearQuest (shell-share)
  • IBM Rational DOORS (third-party integration)
  • IBM Rational System Architect
  • IBM Rational Requirements Composer
• Built-in transformations
  • UML object model to SQL logical data model (IBM InfoSphere Data Architect)
  • UML to XSD; XSD to UML
  • UML to Java, Java to UML
  • UML to JPA, JPA to UML
  • UML to C#, C# to UML
  • UML to VB.NET, VB.NET to UML
  • UML to CORBA
• Graphical editors
  • Java
  • C#
  • VB.NET
• Java architectural analysis, review, and metrics tools
• C# review and metrics tools
• Cloud Client console for interacting with IBM Compute Cloud environments: connect to the Cloud environment and discover, provision, activate, and relinquish Cloud resources

Rational Software Architect’s features can be extended with:

Rational Software Architect Extension for C++
Extend the value of IBM Rational Software Architect to solutions that include C++ implementations.

• C/C++ Development Tools (CDT)
• C++ graphical code editors and visualizers
• Built-in transformations: UML to C++, C++ to UML
• Operating systems supported: Linux, Windows

Rational Software Architect Extension for SOA and WebSphere
Extends the value of IBM Rational Software Architect to the delivery of Java Enterprise Edition solutions, SOA solutions, and solutions targeted to IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal Server. This maximizes developers efficiency and ROI from WebSphere investments.

This extension can be used with IBM Rational Software Architect to provide additional capabilities including:

• The complete feature set of IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Standard Edition
• Tools for building well-architected, scalable, business-driven SOA solutions
• IBM Rational SOMA 2.9 practice guidance: based on extensive IBM Global Services SOA engagement experience, this guides you through the processes and around the pitfalls of candidate service identification and service and solution specification
• Integration with IBM WebSphere Business Modeler – opening process models automatically renders them as UML Activity and Use-case models that can them be used for identification of candidate services and specification of service interactions
• Rich tooling, aligned to IBM Rational SOMA 2.9 practice guidance, for identifying and specifying services using the OMG standard SoaML modeling language and SoaML-based modeling accelerators (micro-patterns of common service specification constructs that can be easily applied to services models to speed up the modeling process)
• Transformations for harvesting service representations (e.g. To participate in model execution-based simulations) and for bottom-up discovery of candidate services: WSDL to UML, Plain-Old Java Object (POJO) to UML, EJB Session bean to UML
• General purpose SOA realization transformations: UML Activity to SoaML, BPMN to SoaML, UML to WSDL/XSD, XSD to UML
• SOA realization transformations that produce outputs consumable by IBM WebSphere Integration Developer, for developing solutions to run on IBM WebSphere Process Server : UML to Services Component Description Language, UML to BPEL
• UML notation-based graphical editor for WSDL
• Tools for designing Java EE solutions: UML-to-EJB and EJB-to-UML transformations
• C/C++ Development Tools (CDT)
• C++ graphical code editors and visualizers
• Built-in transformations: UML to C++, C++ to UML