Re: Is RDi really a "new" product?

Dean, Robert wrote:

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.

Starting to wander far afield here. The original issue was whether RDi is built on top of Eclipse 3.3. My point is that it doesn't need to be because it's not a web application development tool. If you are questioning whether RAD and RSA are built on top of Eclipse 3.3, then that's a different question for a different list, and probably not a midrange.com list.

And I'm not sure which announcement letter you're referring to. The RDi announcement is pretty clear that it's solely meant to develop traditional i5/OS (i.e green screen) applications.

*http://tinyurl.com/28g7ou*

Next, you can look at the RBD announcement, which is IBM's Rational Business Developer; that's the tool that builds EGL applications. Again, not meant for full blown web development, but targeted solely at writing EGL applications. RBD and RDi togother are RDi-SOA, which is IBM's strategy for writing web applications that use ILE business logic.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rdi/

Nowhere are these described as enhancements to RAD; in fact, the whole point of the repackaging is that they unbundled the System i tools from the RAD product. Prior to the unbundling, WDSC indeed included all the components of RAD; that's what I wrote about in my WDSC: Step by Step book. Now, though, you only buy what you need.

Joe