Level: Introductory Lynn M. Mueller, Senior Consultant, Software Group, IBM
15 Mar 2008 
from The Rational Edge: If you are not familiar with IBM Rational Redbooks, this article will guide you to these book-length technical documents designed to help you understand and deploy IBM Rational products, solutions, and technologies.
From The Rational Edge.
Are you familiar with IBM® Redbooks®? These book-length, technical documents are created to help customers, prospective customers, partners, and IBM employees better understand and deploy IBM products, solutions, and technologies. They often include sample code and other support materials. There are also IBM Redpapers, which are shorter documents with similar objectives.
There are four types of Redbooks:
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Tool-oriented. These explain the technology; core features, applications, and usage of a specific tool -- great for new product introductions.
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Strategic. These explain how Rational® tools and services fit into IBM's strategic initiatives.
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Solutions-based. These cover the actual application of Rational tools to solve specific customer problems; they cover multi-product or integration solutions.
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Upgrade/Migration Guidance. These address major discontinuities: new releases, platform migrations, and/or integrations.
The redpieces are authored by subject matter experts from IBM, as well as our business partners or customers. If you are interested becoming an author (also known as a resident), be sure to read the basics on being a "resident" and sign-up for the IBM Redbooks weekly newsletter to learn of new residencies.
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Numerous IBM Rational Redbooks have been authored over the years and are available for download in PDF format, free of charge. Hard copies of individual Redbooks are also available for purchase; details can be found on the Redbooks Website.
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A summary of our recent publications
Global Development and Delivery in Practice: Experiences of the Rational India Lab
This Redbook was published in May 2007. Abstract: IBM Rational is the leading software development brand that supports Global Development and Delivery (GDD) (also known as Geographically or Globally Distributed Development). At Rational Bangalore, we not only practice GDD ourselves, but we also help our customers overcome their GDD challenges. This IBM Redbooks publication presents our collective experiences with GDD: the common problems, the tailoring of Rational tools to solve the problems, and best practices and case studies.
"Building Service-Oriented Banking Solutions with IBM Banking Industry Models and Rational SDP"
This Redpaper was published in October 2007. Abstract: Among the critical business success factors for enterprises to realize the value of service-oriented business transformation is the ability to effectively and efficiently analyze the business's needs and use that analysis to drive the transformation of the business and its supporting architecture. A common language, blueprints (models), a governable enterprise service-oriented solution development and delivery platform, and processes are key components and enablers needed to implement these critical business success factors.
This IBM Redpaper covers important aspects of how to implement each of these key components and enablers, and how to use them together to achieve the needed business and technical results. Specifically, this Redpaper provides important positioning information and detailed tooling guidance on how to use IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform (SDP) with IBM Banking Industry Enterprise Models (IFW) to develop and deliver service-oriented banking solutions.
Rational Application Developer V7 Programming Guide
This Redbook was published in December 2007. Abstract: IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere® Software V7.0 (for short, Rational Application Developer) is the full function Eclipse 3.2 based development platform for developing Java™ 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE™ ) and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE™ ) applications with a focus on applications to be deployed to IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal. Rational Application Developer provides integrated development tools for all development roles, including Web developers, Java developers, business analysts, architects, and enterprise programmers.
Rational Application Developer is part of the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform (SDP), which contains products in four lifecycle categories:
- Architecture management, which includes integrated development environments (Application Developer is here)
- Change and release management
- Process and portfolio management
- Quality management
This IBM Redbooks publication is a programming guide that highlights the features and tooling included with Rational Application Developer V7.0. Many of the chapters provide working examples that demonstrate how to use the tooling to develop applications, as well as achieve the benefits of visual and rapid application development. This publication is an update of Rational Application Developer V6 Programming Guide, SG24-6449.
This book consists of six parts:
- Introduction to Rational Application Developer
- Develop applications
- Test and debug applications
- Deploy and profile applications
- Team development
- Appendixes
The IBM IT Governance Approach: Business performance through IT execution
This Redbook was published in February 2008. Abstract: Information technology (IT) governance has assumed a prevalent spot in technical and management publications. When academics and practitioners alike pose such questions as "Does IT matter?", those of us in the IT field cannot help but to sit up and take notice. We must manage with a focus on articulating the value of IT investments so that the CEO understands what a dollar spent on technology yields in real earnings impact. We must also focus on helping the CIO feel comfortable with balanced risk exposure. The development of a management system that ensures IT can consistently deliver on these objectives is what IT governance is all about.
Guidance in building this type of solution is what this IBM Redbooks publication is about. It explores key concepts that underpin the successful development of your IT governance solution. This book explains the following concepts:
- The right amount of flexibility to yield more effective results
- Approaches to measuring the value of IT's contribution to the business
- The linkage between systematic reduction of variance in reducing project risk
- The role of automation in providing executives the information necessary to adjust to changes on projects
These lessons are codified in the IBM IT Governance Approach, which you instantiate within your organization. By applying this approach with the guiding principles and automating with technology, you will yield a governance solution that is adopted and viewed as an enabler to your teams. Most importantly it will ensure that IT delivers its mission to add measurable business value and reduce risk to the business.
Model Driven Systems Development with Rational Products
This redbook was published in March 2008. Abstract: This IBM Redbooks publication describes the basic principles of the IBM Rational Unified Process® for Systems Engineering (RUP®-SE), which is IBM Rational's instantiation of model-driven systems development (MDSD).
MDSD consists of a set of transformations that progressively refine knowledge, requirements, and design of complex systems. MDSD begins with activities and artifacts meant to promote an understanding of the system's context.
Requirements problems often arise from a lack of understanding of context. In MDSD, understanding the context means understanding the interaction of the system with entities external to it (actors), understanding the services required of the system, and understanding what gets exchanged between the system and its actors. Managing context explicitly means being aware of the shifts in context as you go from one model or decomposition level to the next.
MDSD suggests that a breadth-first collaboration based approach across multiple viewpoints is more effective than a traditional depth-first functional decomposition in creating an architecture that will not only meet requirements, but will prove to be more resilient in the face of inevitable change. MDSD also seeks to provide an effective distribution of responsibilities across resources. Joint realization and abstractions such as localities provide an effective and elegant way of accomplishing this.
Finally, the ability to attach attributes and values to modeling entities and the parametric capabilities of SysML provide a basis for doing simulations or other models to meet cost, risk, and other concerns.
Using Rational Performance Tester Version 7.0
This Redbook was published in March 2008. Abstract: This IBM Redbooks publication is intended to show customers how Rational processes and products support and enable effective systems testing.
The book describes how performance testing fits into the overall process of building enterprise information systems. We discuss the value of performance testing and its benefits in ensuring the availability, robustness, and responsiveness of your information systems that fill critical roles for your enterprise.
Based on years of project experience, we describe the key requirements needed in performance testing tools and how the IBM Rational Performance Tester tool was developed to meet those requirements. We also walk through the choices that we made to steer the tool architecture into using an open source platform as its base with Java as its language to permit ubiquitous platform support.
This book is structured into two parts:
- Understanding Rational Performance Tester
- Applying Rational Performance Tester to enterprise application testing
Look for several more redbooks throughout the year, including Strategic Reuse with Asset-Based Development.
Keep reading The Rational Edge for more Rational Redbook updates.
Notes
- You can read about residency and sign up to receive the newsletter by following the links in the left-hand navigation bar on the main IBM Redbooks page, at
http://w3.itso.ibm.com/
- The domain for Rational Redbooks can be found at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/portals/Rational
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About the author  | 
| | Lynn M. Mueller is a Senior Consultant in IBM Software Group, Rational in West Chester, PA with a focus on architecting solutions for governance and compliance and enterprise organization change efforts with an emphasis on process. Lynn is an IBM Certified Executive IT Specialist with a focus area of business analysis. She is a core team member of the Rational Solution Architecture Community of Practice. |
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