The initial conversation went something like...

"You're going to the Rational Software Developer Conference."
"Ooh, that sounds good."
"It's being held at Disney World in Orlando."
"Ah! Not so good, I'm not a fan of Disney; and I'll have to break the news to my daughter."
"It's in June."
"That's really not good, it's going to be hot, very hot, I don't like it when it's hot."

My objections obviously carried very little weight as I soon found myself sitting on a plane one Saturday afternoon heading for Orlando; a place so hot that a bunch of people jumped in the Space Shuttle Discovery and headed for the depths of space to escape it; I'm sure I heard laughter as Discovery shot upwards past our plane on the way into Orlando.

The deviousness of the plan came to light when I walked into the wonderfully cool air-conditioned hotel lobby and realised that with all that heat and Disney-ness outside I had no choice but to actually attend the conference sessions.

The Rational Software Developer Conference had a number of main themes. As the representative from Morpheus, my two main interests were:
"            Enterprise Modernisation - helping to expose, update and utilise the vast array of business applications running on IBM z and i systems,
"            IBM's Jazz technology - an open platform for collaborative software development.

IBM are making a real commitment to business developers with efforts being put into modernising the tools available for business developers. These range from the introduction of Rational based toolsets for existing development through to tools to analyse, catalogue and extend existing applications ending up with EGL for development of new business applications and entering the wonderful world of web services.

Bleddyn has previously written about the Rational Business Developer (RBD) and Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi). These are bundled into RDi for SOA and present a fully-featured bundle for development on IBM i systems. I attended a number of sessions that walked through the features of RBD and RDi and demonstrated the advantages that these tools offer over traditional green-screen based development. The main benefit is the way that the workbench can be set up to provide multiple views on the code you're writing and how it relates to other application artifacts. This is something we Java developers have been used to for a long time now and often wonder how you get by without them. The integration with the host system is very clean and you can easily work with local files or remote host files in a pretty seamless manner.

EGL was a large part of the Enterprise Modernisation track. We've been using EGL at Morpheus for just over 18 months now and seen it mature into a very powerful toolset. This is no stepping stone to Java or some other technology, it is a fully featured language all of its own. A core feature of EGL is the built-in support for web services. With "service" being one of the main keywords of the language allowing you to create or consume a web service, you don't have to worry too much about the plethora of WS-* standards out there and can focus on building or using the web services that are key to your business.

Jazz technology was a marketing playground and brought out all the various cliches one might expect including Jazz bands and Jazz cafes. However, this didn't disguise the fact that this is a very powerful platform for software development. The first tranche of products based on Jazz were announced at the conference and of these, Rational Team Concert (RTC) was the one that interested me. RTC brings together a number of the tools that developers, project managers and others need (even if they don't always use them). Bringing planning, source code control, project tracking, defect tracking, process automation, build management and collaboration tools into one integrated product seems to have worked pretty well. We will be experimenting with RTC over the coming months to see if it lives up to the initial good impressions.

Of course, given that RBD/RDi/RTC and Rational Application Developer (that we use for our general development) are all built on the Eclipse workbench, we can use all these tools together in a consistent way.

It was difficult to drag me away from all the excitement of the conference to attend a number of social events. My attendance at these events had nothing whatsoever to do with the free beer on offer, but was all about meeting and talking to as many conference attendees as I could before I fell over (with exhaustion). Discos, video games, a concert by The Wallflowers (nope I hadn't heard much about them either, but they're huge in the US, are fronted by Bob Dylan's youngest son and managed a pretty good gig) and a trip to Universal Studios were all on the agenda and enthusiastically attended.

A highlight for many people, including me, was a keynote speech by William Shatner. Yes, we all wondered how Captain Kirk/TJ Hooker/everything else he's done, could possibly be relevant to a software development conference but his contrasts of the job of making films and TV programmes with making software was not too bad and were illustrated by some funny stories. He certainly managed to hold the attention of the room, with most attendees not even checking their email for a whole hour!


Andy