Rational Software
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Rational Software is a software development company. Most of their products are for modelling and aiding in software development and maintenance.
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History
Rational was started in the early 1980s and the company developed software development tools. One product was the R1000 computer, which was a Ada only development computer with a integrated IDE. The software later was ported to UNIX and was sold as APEX. In October 1994 James Rumbaugh was hired and in the fall of 1995 Rational merged with Ivar Jacobson's firm Objectory AB. This created a company which had the three leading software metholodgy inventors, the "three amigos" (also called "the gang of three") Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson in the same house. They started by creating Unified Modeling Language (UML), after that they merged their software development methodologies into Rational Unified Process.
Rose
Rose arose from a few engineers formerly at GE, in Waukesha, Wisconsin. After being acquired by Rational, much of the development was moved to California.
Today Rational develops and maintains a software modeling program, originally called Rose, afterward called Rational Rose. Rational also acquired the Purify memory debugger series such as ClearCase and ClearQuest for software testing, and software configuration management (SCM). Another Rational product is the automated documentation tool: SoDA - Software Documentation Automation.
After Microsoft developed Visual Test, Rational purchased the product rights.
Rose was written to support Ada programming. It currently supports C++ and Java. Unlike many programming artifacts, which are kept and maintained, Rose Models are merely a stage in the development of a program; hence they can be discarded after a few uses, because they can be generated again from the developed program. This is called Round-trip engineering.
RealTime
Rose RealTime was written to support the development of complex reactive systems typically written in C, C++ and Java. It combines the Real-Time Object Oriented Modeling (ROOM) method developed by Bran Selic at ObjecTime Corp, and the UML capabilities from Rational Rose. Rose RealTime supports a model driven development approach that uses forwards engineering to generate up to 90% of the real-time application code found in telecommunications switches and industrial controllers, directly from a UML model. By annotating the UML model with action code 100% of the application code can be produced from the UML model.
Rose RealTime was developed by ObjecTime in Kanata, Canada prior to its acquisition by Rational Software on December 14 1999.
Acquistion
Rational was acquired by IBM in February of 2003, which plans to run it as an independent business.
