Unisys and Rational Software to offer industry-leading, integrated object development environment

Business Wire, Oct 29, 1996

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 29, 1996--

Two leaders in object technology will integrate and market Rational Rose visual modeling tool with the Unisys Universal Repository

Unisys Corp. and Rational Software Corp. Tuesday announced that they plan to integrate Rational Software's Rational Rose, the industry-leading object modeling tool, with the Unisys Universal Repository (UREP), the industry's first fully object-oriented repository.

The integration allows developers to more easily and quickly create distributed object solutions for client/server and data warehousing applications.

The combination of Rational Rose and the Universal Repository allows developers to work seamlessly between a visual modeling tool and an object-oriented repository. Developers can use Rational Rose to express their business needs as graphical object models, providing a framework for generating working, object-oriented client/server applications based on the Universal Repository.

They can also reuse existing UREP-based applications by reverse engineering them into Rational Rose object models, which can then be incorporated into new applications. Using forward and reverse engineering in an object environment, developers will achieve a dramatic increase in productivity and reduced time-to-market.

"By working in concert with Rational, we can offer our clients the most powerful object-oriented modeling environment in the industry," said Dick Ulmer, vice president of Software Products Group at Unisys. "With the integration of Rational Rose and UREP, our clients will be able to build sophisticated object-oriented applications using familiar graphical user interfaces, resulting in unprecedented productivity."

Rational Rose and UREP Features

Developers can use the Rational Rose graphical interface to browse and reuse the extensive set of UREP services as they design repository-based applications. The Rational Rose object model can be converted to an object-oriented repository automatically.

The Universal Repository automatically creates an application programming interface (API) for a client/server application for both UNIX and Windows platforms and allows client development from OLE-enabled applications such as Microsoft Visual Basic.

The combination of Rational Rose and the Universal Repository gives developers several significant advantages:

-- Support for leading object methodologies

-- Reusable and extensible object framework

-- Use of visual development environments such as PowerBuilder,

Delphi and MicroFocus ObjectCOBOL

-- Built-in model management

Through Rational Rose, customers can team-develop complete applications, and, through the integration of UREP, have application versioning capability.

"Rational Rose is designed to easily integrate with a wide range of enterprise development tools," said Gerard Rudisin, vice president of marketing at Rational. "Rational Rose and the Universal Repository's powerful work group facilities, versioning, and object management capabilities provide a powerful combination."

Where a Universal Repository-based application exists, its repository can be reverse-engineered into a Rational Rose object model. This facilitates visualization of the application itself when it must be reengineered, when a new application must be integrated into the existing repository, or when the object model must be updated.

According to Ro Finn, vice president of New Business Development for Unisys Computer Systems Group (or Software Products Group), "With Rational Rose's easy-to-use user interface and with their support of industry-standard methodologies, our customers will be able to work at a higher level of abstraction.

"With the Universal Repository, our customers can continue to focus on their application, rather than worry about the underlying infrastructure, by reusing our rich set of services, such as versioning and interoperability. Together, Rational Rose and UREP provide an integrated environment that will significantly shorten the development time of repository-based applications."

Rational Rose

Rational Rose is an award-winning graphical object modeling and development tool that enables organizations both to model software applications that meet current business needs and to evolve them easily as new requirements emerge.

It allows developers to step back and graphically visualize their applications using the Booch method, the Object Modeling Technique, and the emerging industry-standard notation, the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

The UML is a result of collaborative work among leading methodologists Grady Booch, Jim Rumbaugh, and Ivar Jacobson to standardize the numerous object-oriented methodologies. All three are currently on staff at Rational.

Unisys Universal Repository (UREP)

UREP is a fully object-oriented repository for access, concurrent sharing, and immediate updating of all business information. UREP is being used by independent software vendors (ISVs) and large corporations in various domains such as client/server and object development environments, data warehousing, meta data management, and business-object management.