Re: Is RDi really a "new" product?

The big selling point of Rational's tools is that although they can be used in standalone capacity, they don't require it or even encourage it. They are designed to be co-installed. You could install concurrent versions of RAD + RSA + RDi + RBDe and expect it all to work. According to the announcement letter, RDi provides System i-specific enhancements to RAD's web tools.


-----Original Message-----
From: wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Joe Pluta
Sent: Thu 3/6/2008 2:51 PM
To: Websphere Development Studio Client for iSeries
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Is RDi really a "new" product?

Dean, Robert wrote:

I think you just answered your own question. The reason to plug 3rd party stuff into WDSC is so that we don't have to push IBM to devote the resources to support it.

For example, IBM is focusing its strategic investments on JSF/EGL, and also on RESTful stuff like that delivered in Project Zero. I don't need IBM to support (for example) Struts, Tapestry, Wicket, Seam, or any number of other frameworks if I can add third-party plugins that provide that support to WDSC/RDi.

You questioned someone last week because they had separate workspaces for EGL and non-EGL work. I don't want to have separate Eclipse instances for IBM-provided and non-IBM-provided plugins.

You're kind of missing the point of RDi. Unlike WDSC, RDi is not
designed as a web application development environment and will not be
supported as one. It's a single-purpose tool. RDi-SOA is RDi plus EGL,
again single-purpose. Not meant for development of any other
framework. If you start plugging stuff into it and it breaks, IBM won't
support it. If you are planning to do web development, you need a
different tool, such as RAD, or one of the many Eclipse-based tool
offerings, such as MyEclipse.

Joe