Rational Software Modeler (RSM), made by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Rational Software Rational Machines is an enterprise founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. It changed its n ...

division, is a

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly ...

(UML) 2.0-based visual modeling and design tool. Rational Software Modeler is based on the

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software framework In computer programming, a software framework is a software abstraction that provides generic functionality which developers can extend with custom code to create applications. It establishes a standard foundation for building and deploying soft ...

and is used for visual modeling and model-driven development (MDD) with UML for creating applications and web services. IBM ceased marketing Rational Software Modeler in 2010 and ended support for it in 2015. Much of the same functionality is now available through Rational Software Architect.

Overview

The capabilities of the last major release (Version 7) of Rational Software Modeler include: # Support for UML version 2.1 # Support for model-to-model transformations # Model management for parallel development and architectural re-factoring, e.g., split, combine, compare and merge models and model fragments # Support for application of design patterns It is integrated with other IBM Rational Software tools, such as ClearCase configuration management and ClearQuest exception handling (defect reports and change requests). RSM is engineered as a plugin that sits on top of the open-source

development platform. RSM can be installed either on top of an existing Eclipse v3.2 installation, or as a new Eclipse v3.2 instance. As RSM is Eclipse-based, it can use third-party Eclipse plugins, as well as plugins specifically for Rational tools.

History

has a long history in application modeling, beginning in the early 1990s with the work of

Grady Booch Grady Booch (born February 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software archit ...

James Rumbaugh James E. Rumbaugh (born August 22, 1947) is an American computer scientist and object-oriented methodologistIvar Jacobson Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson (; born September 2, 1939) is a Swedish computer scientist and software engineer, known as a major contributor to UML, Objectory, Rational Unified Process (RUP), aspect-oriented software development, and Essence. Biog ...

. They combined competing modeling approaches to form what eventually became the

. Rational Software's first visual modeling and development tool was Rational Rose, a stand-alone modeling tool that integrated the

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

(API) level with third-party

Integrated Development Environments Integration may refer to: Biology *Multisensory integration * Path integration * Pre-integration complex, viral genetic material used to insert a viral genome into a host genome *DNA integration, by means of site-specific recombinase technolog ...

(IDEs) in order to support a variety of programming languages and other implementation technologies. While Rational Rose was an important step towards bringing Model-driven development (MDD) closer to practicing software developers, it was found that only a small fraction of developers used modeling on a routine basis. A key problem was identified – developers didn't like to leave their IDE. They wanted visual modeling to be integrated — not with their IDE, but rather ''inside'' their IDE. Rational responded to this need in 2002 with IBM Rational XDE software, providing a development environment for the programming technologies emerging at the time: Java and

Microsoft .NET The Microsoft .NET strategy is a marketing plan that Microsoft followed in the early 2000s. Steve Ballmer described it as the company's "most ambitious undertaking since Internet Strategy Day in 1995". In support of this strategy, between 2000 an ...

. IBM Rational XDE was characterized as the next generation of IBM Rational Rose — not a new version of it (hence the name change), and not necessarily a replacement for Rose (since IBM Rational XDE was purposefully restricted to support only a select number of IDEs and implementation technologies). However, with each addition of a tool or capability came another point-to-point integration requirement. As more and more capabilities were added, Rational began to reach the practical limits of this style of tool integration. For the next-generation MDD products, model-driven development functions were built on top of Eclipse to form a more complete MDD tool. IBM Rational Software Architect, IBM Rational Software Modeler and IBM Rational Systems Developer were the result of these changes; merging the silos that previously defined modeling, development and code analysis into a more integrated design.

IBM Rational Software Modeler versions

*v6.0: Released December 2004. Based on Eclipse v3.0, UML v2.0. *v7.0: Released December 2006. Based on Eclipse v3.2, UML v2.1. *v7.5: Released September 2008. *v7.5.5.5: Last version released.

List of Eclipse-based IBM analysis, design and construction products

* Rational Application Developer * Rational Software Architect *Rational Systems Developer * Rational Business Developer Extension * WebSphere Integration Developer

References

External links