Aldon's Lifecycle Management Suite Ready for RDi

Published: April 29, 2008

by Dan Burger

With the introduction of i 6.1 (formerly known as i5/OS V6R1) IBM repackaged the application development toolset for the System i platform courtesy of the Rational software development division. So it's good-bye WebSphere Development Studio Client 7.0 (WDSc) and WebSphere Development Studio Client Advanced Edition 7.0 (WDSc AE) and hello Rational Development for i 6.1. It's not like WDSc just disappears. IBM will support those products until the spring of 2010. However, there is a transition in progress and it includes software vendors that supported WDSc.

For instance, Aldon announced last week that its application lifecycle management (ALM) software is fully compatible with the Rational Developer for System i (RDi) tools that are labelled as Version 7.1.

"Our support of RDi means that our customers will continue to access their preferred development environment," said Matt Scholl, president and COO of Aldon. "By ensuring our plug-ins are aligned with RDi, we continue to show our commitment and ongoing investment in the IBM Power System (formerly System i) platform."

Aldon's ALM software is comprised of Aldon Lifecycle Manager, Aldon Deployment Manager, Aldon Community Manager, and Aldon CMDB. The suite of products provide process automation, extensive management capabilities, software configuration and change management, and distribution and release management in multi-platform environments.

In terms of RDi, application development in the WebSphere environment will not be greatly affected, because the new tools are very similar to the WDSc tools. RDi V7.1 is an Eclipse-based development workstation that includes application diagram support for ILE RPG, ILE COBOL, and CL It includes the application diagramming function for RPG that was in WDSC AE as well as single sign-on support using IBM's enterprise identity mapping (EIM) technology.

Compared to WDSc, RDi has enhanced debugging support and support for multithreading in RPG, which was significantly improved in i 6.1. It also supports RPG varying length variables, decimal floating point in the ILE C compiler, and Occurs Depending On (ODO) in ILE COBOL.

If you're accountable for the budget, however, you should know that RDi is sold on a per-workstation basis for $795. WDSc was bundled with the WebSphere Development Studio server-side tools, which cost $4,150.

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