Features and benefits
IBM® Rational® Application Developer
Rational Application Developer is the only Java IDE tool you need to design, develop, and deploy your applications. This page lists the features and benefits available in Rational Application Developer Standard Edition and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software
The following capabilities are available in both Rational Application Developer Standard Edition and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software.
Eclipse 3.6 Integration - Open source environment that brings integration and extensibility to the development environment
Includes all Eclipse 3.6 features and extends this functionality with visual development tools and IBM WebSphere® support
Productivity Enhancement Features
Flexible installation provides access to only the features you need
Cheat sheets for common development patterns
Application templates and template library
How-to and scenario-based tutorials
Getting started and installation guide
Content assist, validation quickfixes
Supports agile development with tools to refactor code, and unit testing
IBM WebSphere Support - Integrated unit test environments and Feature Pack Support
WebSphere Application Server unit test environments: v6.0 (remote), v.6.1, v7.0, v8.0
Compatible WebSphere Portal Server unit test environments: v6.1, v7.0
Supports both local and remote test servers
Support for WebSphere Feature Packs: Web 2.0, OSGi, JPA 2.0, SCA, XML, CEA, Web Services, EJB 3.0 Feature Packs
Support for building SIP 1.1 (JSR 289), GSMA OneAPI, Parlay X enabled applications with WebSphere Telecom Web Services Server Toolkit
WebSphere performance profiling and logging
Test environment for HTML and JSP files, servlets
EJB universal test client
Ant scripting and JUnit testing framework
TCP/IP Monitor to monitor requests and responses between a browser and an application server
Automated tools to manage server instances and server configurations, including automated creation and submission of wsadmin scripts
Test different run-time environments locally or remotely
Java Enterprise Edition Development - Comprehensive support for the JEE programming model accelerates EJB component development and testing
Concurrent support for J2EE 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 , Java EE 5 and Java EE 6 specifications
Support for Servlet 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.0 and JSP 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2
Java Server Faces 1.1, 1.2, 2.0
Support for EJB™ 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1
Java Persistence API (JPA) support 1.0, 2.0
Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.1, 2.2
Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) 1.1
Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6
Support for Java Message Service (JMS) and EJB Query Language
Support for JAR, EAR, WAR packaging
O/R Mapping (top-down and bottom up)
Generated EJB Test Client
EJB client JAR support to automate the creation of EJB clients
EJB snippet support to simplify generation of EJB client access code
IBM Workload Deployer – Transform applications into cloud applications and deploy and test on IBM Workload Deployer v3.0
New Cloud Application wizard to simplify the creation of Cloud applications that may include Enterprise, Web and/or OSGi projects
New Server wizard to simplify the creation of a IBM Workload Deployer Application System runtime target within the IDE
Supports running, rerunning, restarting, and stopping of Cloud applications deployed to a IBM Workload Deployer runtime target within the IDE
Quick access to the IBM Workload Deployer application system web-based dashboard within the IDE
Export function to write Cloud applications and its associated resource archived files (e.g. EAR, WAR, EBA) to the file system for direct integration with a IBM Workload Deployer application system
Java Development - Build rich Java applications using a variety of visual editors, wizards and code generation, merging and re-factoring tools
Integrated Java Development Environment
Configurable Java Runtime Environment (JRE™)
Java Development Kit (JDK™), Version 6 support
Scrapbook for testing code snippets
Re-factoring
Web Services Development - Comprehensive Web services and SOA development tools simplify and automate the process of building WS-I compliant, interoperable Web services applications
Web services wizards to accelerate Web services development
Support for Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC), Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS 2.2), Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB 2.2), SOAP 1.1 and 1.2, SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ 1.3), UDDI 2.0 and v3, WSDL 1.1
Support for Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), Web Services Addressing (WS-Addressing) and SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)
Create, validate and detect WS-I compliant Web services
Web services discovery based on WSIL
Discover and publish services to the UDDI Business Registry
Create or transform Web services from existing artifacts, such as Java beans, and EJB components
Build artifacts by wrapping in SOAP and describing in WSDL
WSDL editor
Develop Web services client application from samples
Deploy and test Web services into the WebSphere Application Server or Tomcat test environments
Web services Explorer
Process guidance for developing SOA applications
Web 2.0 Development – Features to aid the development of responsive Rich Internet Applications using the latest development and debugging tools
Ajax development with Dojo Toolkit and IBM extensions. Includes code assist, validation and refactoring support
JavaScript Editor with code assist, validation, refactoring
Support for REST (JAX-RS) services
Create JAX-RPC style services to access server side artifacts, through web remoting interfaces
Supports JSON and XML data interchange
Integrate ATOM and RSS feeds
Integration with Firebug JavaScript debugger
Web Development - RAD tools and wizards bring all aspects of Web development into a common interface and enable developers with diverse technical backgrounds, and even those unfamiliar with Java™, to quickly build rich, data-driven applications
JavaServer™ Faces support: JSF reference implementation, JSF components and visual tools
JSF-based report viewing component for embedding reports into Web applications
Build JSF custom components
Integrate 3rd party JSF libraries into Page Designer
Web Site Designer to visually manage and analyze Web sites
Integrated visual page designer with round-trip raw edit ability
JSP™ and servlet wizards
Struts 1.2, 1.3 support
Templates and samples
Support for HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CHTML, WML, Struts and visual custom tags
Page Designer with round-trip raw edit capability for WYSIWYG layout of JSP pages
Portal development - Visual portlet an portal development tools and a WebSphere Portal unit test environment for the development and testing of both individual portlets and entire portal applications.
Visual portal application development and editing of the themes and skins that control their appearance
Compatible WebSphere Portal Server unit test environments: v6.1, v7.0 beta
Integrated support for JSF and the Struts framework
Business portlet development using IBM WebSphere Portal Application Integration (SAP, Seibel)
Portlet templates
Support for IBM Portlet API and the JSR 168 and JSR 286 standard portlet API
XML Development - Comprehensive tools for creating, editing and transforming XML documents and integrating relational data and XML
XML, XML schemas tools
XML authoring tools - XML editor, DTD editor, XML schema editor
XML transformation tools: XML-to-XML mapping editor, XSLT generator, XSL trace editor
XSL editor
Xpath wizard
The following capabilities are only available in Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software
WebSphere Adapter Support - Tools Supporting development adapters for third-party products
SAP
PeopleSoft Enterprise
Siebel
Oracle E-Business Suite
JD Edwards
Team Development - Integration with IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational ClearCase® enables a wide range of change management operations to be performed directly from within your development environment, provides an integrated view of projects and increases both collaboration and team productivity
- Rational Team Concert Integration
- Collaborative Debugging
- Share code coverage results
- Pluggable version control repositories
- Adaptors for Concurrent Versions System
- Adaptors for Rational ClearCase
- RUP® Developer Configuration
Code Quality, Testing and Deployment
Code review (Static Analysis): Includes over 200 predefined rules for coding guidelines and best practices. Provides 'Quick Fix' suggestions and allows for customization of rules, via rules templates
Line Level coverage to track execution statistics of your lines of code
Enhanced runtime analysis tools: memory leak detection, thread lock detection, user defined probes, code coverage
Code Visualization for Java and EJB to visualize and edit Java and Java EE components
UML class diagram editor for Java classes and interfaces and EJBs
UML views of data tables and enhanced diagram support
UML sequence diagrams of method bodies
