Rational, InLine Partnership Speeds EJB Generation
Rational Software Corp. (
www.rational.com) is partnering with InLine Software Corp. (
www.inline-software.com) to integrate InLine Standard, an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) development tool, with Rational Rose. The combining of technologies will allow developers modeling applications in Rose to automatically generate EJBs.
"With all the other languages people develop with in Windows NT, this adds a very powerful way to visualize and architect how you want to put applications in place," says Jeff Hammond, product manager at Rational Software. "You can create the model in Rational Rose, and the EJBs get seamlessly created in InLine."
The companies say the new product will encapsulate the UML/EJB Bridge, an emerging Java standard, which can be applied to the latest version of Rose and beyond. Developers can then apply the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to automatically create and deploy EJBs. The resulting EJB component-based applications can be deployed on Java application servers, such as BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere, and in integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Inprise/Borland JBuilder, NetBeans Developer, and Symantec VisualCafe.
"Basically, the people doing development of enterprise applications are using UML models with Rational Rose," explains Andy Simmons, vice president of marketing at InLine Software. "They can pick their favorite IDE and deploy to whatever server they want and leverage the tools they already have in place."
The JavaSoft Community (www.javasoft.com), a Java standards body, has been working on the UML/EJB Bridge as a standard for UML and EJB mapping. The standard isn't complete, but the Rational/InLine solution has been written to the draft of the mapping specification and will be updated to remain compliant with it as it goes through inception.
The UML/EJB Bridge adds to InLine Standard’s functionality of automatically generating code from the model, by providing a translation system that reads UML and then generating EJB components, and vice versa.
"The other nice thing is if you already have existing JavaBeans, you can bring them into Rational Rose and synchronize from Rose into InLine," Rational's Hammond explains. "If I make changes in the InLine environment, those will be synchronized into the Rose model. It makes for a very effective and powerful environment because it lets people work the way they want to work."