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Rational Application Developer vs Eclipse

What are the features or functions present in Rational Application Developer and not in Eclipse? Why is Rational Application Developer needed?

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Eclipse does not have a built-in server to run the web application. RAD is Eclipse + some more functions.

RAD is a commercial Eclipse-based development environment developed by IBM. At a very high level, in RAD, WebSphere is bundled, and you can deploy your web application to the WebSphere server itself. If you are working on an application that is actually deployed to the IBM WebSphere server (during production), you can use RAD to avoid surprises that may occur after deployment.

However, deploying to WebSphere on RAD is a process of time and resources.

If you want to check out free alternatives, you can use Eclipse and the Tomcat server.

You can read more about RAD at the Wikipedia link, as well as the IBM Web site .

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By default, Eclipse is only a Java development environment, not Java EE, so you need the Eclipse package for Java EE developers to develop Java EE. RAD is based on this, plus it has many other features that are more strictly related to the development and deployment of applications for various WebSphere products.

Here is a short list with additional features in RAD (it is not a complete list and may vary in detailed comparison between specific versions of RAD and Eclipse for Java EE):

  • Programming Support Extensions
    • Advanced JSF Features
    • SCA, SIP, OSGi, WebSphere Batch tooling
    • Portlet and Portal Tools
    • JCA Wizards (Creating Custom JCA Adapters)
    • Jython wsadmin WebSphere scripting editor
  • Modeling and Analysis Extensions
    • UML renderings
    • Code Coverage Tools
    • Static Code Analysis
    • Some extensions to profiling tools
  • Deployment extensions - provided test environments and server tools for:
    • WebSphere Application Server 7.0, 8.0, 8.5.5
    • WebSphere Liberty - New Lightweight Runtime
    • WebSphere Portal
    • Bluemix Deployment Support Tools

You can see what's new here - RAD 9.1 new features and improvements

If you plan to buy WebSphere Application Server, you might be interested in Tools Edition , where in addition to server licenses, you get an unlimited number of RAD licenses for development for this runtime environment.

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The long answer is short. If you have a Websphere server in your enterprise, you are better off using RAD, but if you do not, just use Eclipse. The additional tools in RAD over Eclipse are primarily intended to support an IBM product (WAS, Blumix, WID, ..).

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