Among the features of the Atlantic release are different perspectives, or views, for developers depending on their role, Nackman said. For example, a developer might look at the user interface and see development tasks he or she must complete and, once those are complete, a code tester will see that there is new functionality in an application that needs to be tested before the application can be deployed.
Atlantic also will beef up support for JavaServer Faces, a Java standard for building Web-enabled GUIs, and Service Data Objects, a standard co-developed by IBM and BEA Systems that enables developers to link applications to databases in services-oriented architectures. Other new features that will be supported in Atlantic are UML 2.0, the latest version of the modeling standard, and realtime deployment to the WebSphere Application Server.
The next version of the IBM Software Development Platform also will include support for C and C++ applications, a move that demonstrates IBM Rational's continued commitment to work with Microsoft even though the software giant is arguably IBM Rational's main competitor, Devlin said.
Microsoft was one of the sponsors of the show, he said, and IBM Rational continues to be a Visual Studio integration partner, with plans to support Visual Studio 2005 when it is available next year. Despite this display of solidarity, IBM Rational's plans for Atlantic seem to be directly competitive with Microsoft's plans for Visual Studio.
Bola Rotibi, a software development strategies analyst at Ovum, said it seems IBM Rational's goal with Atlantic is to create a collaborative development environment much like what Microsoft is attempting to tackle with Visual Studio Team System 2005, the new SKU for Visual Studio, Enterprise Edition, due out next year.
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