Overview of IBM Rational Programming Patterns
Rational® Programming Patterns is a modern, comprehensive, and collaborative Integrated Development Environment. It is used to reach a high development and maintenance productivity in Pacbase applications and in applications that are coded in other languages such as Java™ or native COBOL.
Rational Programming Patterns is an Eclipse and Jazz®-based environment integrated into the IBM® Software Delivery Platform. It is also a web client integrated into the Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert) web interface to access the artifacts on the server in a read-only mode.
Rational Programming Patterns streamlines the development by enabling Pattern Driven Programming. This method provides accurate and predictable work estimation, consistent performance measurements, high quality generated code, and guarantees homogeneous coding styles, algorithms, and structures across the programs.
With Rational Programming Patterns and the Software Delivery Platform, all the developers in a company use the same set of tools in common domains such as change management, software configuration management, build management, development process, reporting, and collaboration. Using these common tools and processes allows the teams to work more transparently and to share best practices.
- A set of migration procedures to migrate the Pacbase applications to the IBM Software Delivery Platform.
- An Eclipse client that is integrated with different products, depending on the environment: IBM Developer for z/OS® or Rational Developer for AIX® and Linux®. The client is also always integrated with Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert).
- A web client available as a chargeable component. It is integrated into the Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert) web interface. It can be used to analyze the applications on the server without updating them.
- A server that is integrated with Jazz Team Server and CCM Application.
- Migration procedures migrate at a low cost all the Pacbase development assets to a modern, comprehensive, and strategic development environment that surpasses Pacbase capabilities.
- Rational Programming Patterns generates a COBOL source code syntactically equivalent to the COBOL source code that was generated by Pacbase V3.5. These generators are complemented by a set of comparison tools that ensure that the migration was correct.
- Non-regression tests and training of the Pacbase developers are limited.
- The continuity of Pacbase high-level development and maintenance productivity is ensured.
- For the first time, the z Systems®, Java, and Pacbase developers work in a common collaborative and integrated development platform.
- The design features
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- Data description patterns are used to master the information concept of an IT system in a form that is understandable by a business domain specialist and consumable by software developers.
- Programming patterns for traditional applications provide a set of models that improves the productivity of the developers.
- The whole range of application types is covered: batch, transactional, and client/server.
- Numerous design tools are available, such as renaming, moving, duplicating, comparing, documenting, or publishing instances.
- COBOL source management
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- An extended COBOL source code editor facilitates the maintenance of user-specific code in the generated source code by optimizing the development tasks. It provides, for example, filters, wizards, syntax highlighting, content assist, real-time syntax check, and interactive debugging.
- Macro patterns provide a powerful capability for reusing logic among programs, minimizing complexity through encapsulation while providing a single point of maintenance.
- COBOL micropatterns contribute to increasing the development productivity. They offer a powerful way to insert generated COBOL lines in a COBOL program. They favorably replace complex Pacbase operators and preserve the productivity of a developer when business logic must be inserted in generated source code.
- A powerful generation function targets IBM code but also handles non-IBM code and platforms.
- The desynchronization of a generated file with the design of the instance itself or of an instance involved in its generation is detected.
- Rational Programming Patterns extensibility
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- The Software Development Kit makes the development of a new generator easier by breaking up the complexity of a transformation into several smaller and more simple atomic transformations through Micropatterns and Skeletons.
- The Application Programming Interface makes it possible to complement the Rational Programming Patterns functions and tailor them in Java. For example, it can be used to navigate the models in a special way, to create user command lines and menus, or to customize quality control rules, micropatterns, and patterns.
- Integration with Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert)
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- Procedures can be used to extract and import projects or components from Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert).
- Impact analysis and multi-criteria search, as an extension of the Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert) services, contribute to increasing the maintenance productivity.
- The Engineering Workflow Management (Rational Team Concert) control features have been complemented. Rational Programming Patterns specific preconditions can control that the files that are about to be uploaded to the server conform to predefined requirements.
- Quality control
- The scope of the Software Analyzer tool from IBM Developer for z/OS and Rational Developer for AIX and Linux is extended to provide analysis support for the design entities and specific code. The adherence to the specific internal guidelines, best practices, or coding standards of each company is then ensured.