Re: Rational Updater

> From: Dean, Robert
> 
> It's important to note that the "Rational folks" are largely the
> "WebSphere Studio" folks.  They moved to the Rational organization about
> 18 months before the name change, and prior to the release of WSAD 5.1.2
> and WDSC 5.1.2.

Some people moved, certainly, but there is absolutely a schism between the
Rational folks and the iSeries.  It may have existed at the time of WDSC
5.x, but it certainly didn't have as blatant a face as it does now.  I
talked to someone from Rational and he started the conversation by saying he
didn't want to talk about anything that had to do with the iSeries.  Clearly
this is a problem.


> - The WDSC bits seem to be pretty solid, but they're not without issues.
> My previous PC (a Pentium 4 2.6 GHz w/2GB RAM) would completely lock up
> WDSC *and* Windows if an action blocked in the UI thread.  Many RSE
> features (opening a filter that returns a large number of hits, for
> example) block the UI thread.

I've never heard of this!  I've been using WDSC extensively for years now
and I never once has WDSC lock up the workstation.  I even used WDSC on a
laptop over a cell phone connection, and while it occasionally bombed out it
never locked the laptop.


> I hope the longer-than-usual development cycle on the next release of the
> Rational tooling means that more effort is being spent in getting things
> right.  I'm personally holding out hope that the next generation is based
> on Eclipse 3.2.  Many of the improvements in the Java Development Tools
> (such as exporting refactoring information in JAR files) look very useful.

I doubt it.  Since 3.2 is only on milestone releases, it's unlikely that the
Rational build team would use it.  That's just the reality of products built
on open source projects.

Nothing against open source, BTW.  Eclipse is about as well run an open
project as you will see.  To see a development team that really understands
the concepts of backwards compatibility (something very much lacking in some
of the IBM development teams), read the following.  Just because some
developers used an undocumented API, they actually re-wrapped an entire
milestone release:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=128866


Joe