Rational Software
Rational Software is a software development company. Most of their products are for modelling and aiding in software development and maintenance.
Rational develops and maintains a software modeling program, originally called Rose, afterward called Rational Rose. Rational also acquired the Purify memory debugger series such as ClearCase and ClearQuest for software testing, and software configuration management (SCM). Another Rational product is the automated documentation tool: SoDA - Software Documentation Automation.
After Microsoft developed Visual Test, Rational purchased the product rights.
Rose was written to support Ada programming. It currently supports C++ and Java. Unlike many programming artifacts, which are kept and maintained, Rose Models are merely a stage in the development of a program; hence they can be discarded after a few uses, because they can be generated again from the developed program. This is called Round-trip engineering.
Rose RealTime was written to support the development of complex reactive systems typically written in C, C++ and Java. It combines the Real-Time Object Oriented (ROOM) method and supporting code generation obtained from ObjecTime Corp, and the UML capabilities from Rational Rose. Rose RealTime uses forwards engineering to generate up to 90% of the application code found in telecommunications switches and industrial controllers. The UML model can be annotated with action code so that the generated code can be discarded and generated again from the UML model.
One competitor program is Peter Coad's Together/Whiteboard which is available for download. This program also allows Round-trip engineering, but generates mostly Java code.
Rose arose from a few engineers formerly at GE, in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
After being acquired by Rational, much of the development was moved to California.
Rational was acquired by IBM in February of 2003, which plans to run it as an independent business.
