You're comparing apples and oranges here. RDP and RDi are products.
You either can or could purchase them. They have part numbers. Other
products include WDSC, RBD, RAD and RTC.
Meanwhile RSE is a perspective. It's not a product, you can't buy it.
You only get it as part of something else.
This goes back to the early days of Eclipse. Eclipse is designed to
allow developers to create views and perspectives, which are tools that
let people do their jobs. Meanwhile Eclipse allows marketers to bundle
those tools together in ways that make sense to sell them, and that
becomes a product.
Us green screen dinosaurs are used to buying AS/400 tools as standalone,
dedicated products. It's a tool, it works on the AS/400, and that's all
it does. SEU, SDA, DFU. Because of that, we tend to think of RSE as an
AS/400 tool, and sometimes we talk about it as a standalone tool, but
it's not. It's just one small part of a tool suite which we can
configure however we want. (And yes, I used AS/400 intentionally <grin>).
Specifically in this case, RSE was one perspective that was included in
WDSC, RDi and now in one of the features of RDP. WDSC and RDi were both
midrange-oriented bundled products. But IBM and more specifically
Rational moved away from that, and continued to unbundle things. Now
the only bundles they offer are "soft bundles" which are combinations of
existing products.
RDP is the logical evolution of the unbundling process: the base RDP
doesn't have platform-specific features, it's the base on which
platform-specific features can be combined. Get just the RPG tools and
you have the equivalent of RDi. Add in RBD and you have RDi-SOA. Take
RDi and add RAD and you have what was originally included in WDSC. In
all of these cases, RSE is still just one small part of the whole thing.
Even in RDi, RSE is not the entire product. RSE is not very useful
without the debugging perspective, as one example. And of course the
fact that you can use RDi to write Java applications is a very important
feature, at least for those of us who like Java. :)
Anyway, long answer for a short question. I just wanted to point out
that RSE is not a product, it's just a feature. RDP and RDi are like
iPad and iPad2; RSE is like the GPS. It's part of both, but not a
standalone product.
Joe
Is the RSE PC Software client just an older version of RDP, which is an older version of RDi (Rational Developer for i) ?
midrange.com
