Rational Straddles Java and .NET (Continued)
Development Tools Directions
Q: What's your view of the trend toward development suites that address the full development lifecycle?
Devlin: We were the father of that notion back in the mid-'90s when we took the strategy of acquiring the best. That meant paying a premium price, which Wall Street didn't always like until we got to the other side. We believe that we forced the hand of the rest of the industry. Customers resonated with the message that they didn't want to be forced to integrate those tools themselves and deal with compatibility, which forced other vendors to put together those suites with the second-tier products.
Now, we're going beyond that with the technology preview I mentioned earlier, integrating testing and deployment. We have many years to go before we fully integrate the lifecycle.
But there is another dimension: the connection between the platform and the development tools. To get full automation you need both—the integration across the lifecycle and the integration with the platform.
This goes to your first question. It is clear we'll be able to do that for the Java 2 environment. What you'll see is that accelerates the automation we provide developers because we can increase both lifecycle and platform integration.
Historically, we've done that for the Microsoft platform. Every indication is that we'll continue to be able to do that. I'm confident because Microsoft came to us immediately after the merger announcement in December and asked us to do a joint announcement.
Q: What's your take on the emerging market for visual programming tools in the Java market? How will those impact the demand for modeling tools?
Devlin: You're right that Microsoft with Visual Studio had led the market in visual development. But the Java community is getting within striking distance of the Microsoft environment in terms of having those capabilities. If you look at capabilities in WebSphere Studio 5.0 and some of the new things that are coming out, you'll see the Java world support both the hard-core Java programmer who wants to build JavaBeans or J2EE components that encapsulate business logic or some technology, as well as the more corporate developers who are perhaps less focused on technology and more focused on their business domain. These corporate developers want to build something quickly on top of Java either in Java or in something like the technology we acquired from NeuVis Inc. last year and are just showing now.
That's really what Eclipse and WebSphere are all about: having a common framework to support these different kinds of users.
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Role of Architecture in Enterprise 
