While IBM was extremely vocal last week over its acquisition of software testing company Green Hat into the Rational fold, the company has been less talkative on its recent release of Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools (EWDT) version 0.7, the first open source version of its EGL development tool.
Building upon the free EGL Community Edition software donated to the community four years ago, this new release is likely to be of interest to teams building rich web application designed to run on the IBM i operating system and can access RPG logic.
Note: RPG is a high-level non-procedural language; RPR stands for Report Program Generator. IBM i (formerly known as i5/OS) is a 20-year old business-level operating system from IBM for Power Systems including AS/400, iSeries, and System I machines.
Writing on the IBM developerWorks blog, IBM product manager Will Smythe notes that this new release bears some resemblance to the IBM EGL Community Edition (the free tool IBM delivered in 2009). "We have also contributed many of the great capabilities delivered in Rational Business Developer version 8.0.1, as well as added completely new capabilities, like a new IDE Test Server that greatly simplifies and speeds up development and test of services all from within the IDE."
New features include the opportunity to:
- Visually construct modern rich applications that run in all popular web browsers, utilizing the Dojo toolkit and other standard HTML widgets
- Integrate with existing JSON and XML-based web services
- Create web services that perform business logic and interface with relational databases
- Test and debug end-to-end (browser to server) across the entire solution without needing to configure or deploy to a server
- Deploy to a local Java application server (like Apache Tomcat) and export as a standard Java web archive (WAR)
"The EGL technology has come a long way over the last few years, and we are grateful for the continued support from our customer and partner community. We encourage all of you to explore the details of the open project and to download and try the new tools," wrote Smythe.
