Aldon Supports RDi 7.5 with Change Management Plug-In

May 19, 2009 Alex Woodie

System i developers who have adopted the latest version 7.5 release of the Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) development environment can now take advantage of Aldon‘s change management software for i OS. Last week, Aldon announced the availability of a plug-in that integrates its Aldon Lifecycle Management (ALM) functionality within the RDi interface.

Aldon, like most of the change management vendors targeting the System i market, has taken advantage of the openness of Eclipse to develop plug-ins that allow users to access their change management functionality from within the friendly confines of the Eclipse development framework.

It’s a good deal, when you think about it. By make essential change management functionality accessible from the same screen that developers use to write RPG, COBOL, or EGL, it can eliminate the need for developers to jump around, thus keeping them focused on developing awesome code instead of trudging through dreary change management tasks. Let’s face it, most developers would rather be slinging C-specs, not spending their time with administrative functions, so anything that can hide the change management process is a good thing.

“Building solutions that make developers jobs easier and end-results smarter has always been our number one objective,” says Aldon President and CEO Matt Scholl in a press release. That goes for System i solutions, as well as open systems solutions, he adds.

Aldon says it uses the standard team repository approach with its change management plug-ins for RDi, which allows for standard change management functions–such as check out and promotions–to be accessed with just a few right clicks of the mouse. Entire applications can be developed, tested, and managed within a single RDi session, while its software “works behind the scenes, enforcing processes at each and every stage of that application development,” the company says.

The latest release of the Aldon Lifecycle Manager (ALM) software now supports RDi 7.5, which is based on the Eclipse 3.4 platform.

ALM provides a range of lifecycle automation capabilities for shops that do their own development in RPG, .NET, Java, and a dozen or so other languages. Grouped under the general “lifecycle automation” banner are things like change management and workflow, version control, build and release management, deployment, requirements management, and software configuration management.

Aldon used to talk about an enterprise version of ALM, often called LMe, that was targeted at “open-systems” shops developing for Windows and Unix, and an i OS version of ALM, called ALM for IBM i Edition (or just LMi) that targeted development on the System i (Power Systems, iSeries, AS/400).

But any reference to these different editions has been erased from Aldon’s Web site, probably because they are all based on the core ALM product and it confused customers. Rest assured, if you’re buying ALM, you’re getting System i support.

The ALM plug-in for RDi 7.5 is available now. The plug-in can be downloaded for free by current customers at www.aldon.com.