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Are You Multilingual?

Rational enables development in multiplatform environments

Languages and Platforms Galore

The consequence of this situation is businesses will require their application–development staff to be able to move between projects with agility and precision even when those projects vary in deployment platform, runtime environment and source–code language. Code written this week will be legacy next week, but it will still require care, feeding and attention. To be valued employees or consultants, application programmers will need to move between projects with the same agility and precision, across those platforms, runtime environments and source code languages that the applications run on and are written in.

Tools Speed Multiplatform Development

It’s clear application–development teams need assistance to have the required breadth and depth of experience to work effectively with such multiplatform solutions. Luckily, the latest commercial development tools enable application architects, developers, testers and build experts to do just that: move with agility and precision between platforms, runtime environments and programming languages. Using tools such as Rational Application Developer or Rational Developer for Power Systems, application developers can connect to remote systems; interact with applications and services running on those systems; edit, compile and interactively debug programs that are running on remote systems; and more, all from a consolidated, integrated, development environment based on the Eclipse platform.

Rational collaborative application–lifecycle tools, in particular, Rational Team Concert, offer features that address the management of software projects that span multiple platforms and environments. Because you’re managing project work items and tasks in a common system, you can set up links between related work items and establish and track overall project estimates. You can coordinate and automate the build and test phase of software projects that span multiple platforms using distributed build agents running on multiple operating systems, including IBM i, z/OS, Linux for System z, AIX, Linux for Power Systems, Linux on Intel platforms and other environments. Coordinating the build and test of these various components of the solution, the development team can be sure of testing the entire multiplatform system using levels of software that they intended.

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