Reuse is a term that had been wriggling through the IT industry for many years now. In various ways, organizations tend to catalogue and store all the artefacts liable to reuse. Methods of catalogue production go from artefact lists in Excel all the way to the custom development solutions made particularly for that purpose.
Rational Asset Manager (RAM) is the youngest member of the Rational products family. The product is intended for identification, creation, management, search and reuse of all development assets of the organization. Through this tool it is possible to organize applications, models, components, patterns, services, frameworks, templates, documents and all other assets the organization could profit from, should they be reused.
All assets are organized and catalogued according to the Reusable Asset Specification , an OMG standard for describing reusable software assets.
A large part of Rational Asset Manager is dedicated and intended for working with services and SOA. All services identified as suitable for reuse can be governed inside the RAM repository. Rational Asset Manager is closely integrated with IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository tool. It is possible to search already published services from WSSR through RAM and, vice versa, the services catalogued in RAM by means of a wizard publish in WSSR, as well as to see in any given time their interrelations.
Picture 1: Screenshot from IBM Rational Asset Manager tool
With enormous possibilities of organization and safety assurance of all assets in the repository, great care was given to the integration with other products of the IBM Rational family as well. The tool itself can be used as a web client or as a plug-in for Eclipse platform used by all of the IBM Rational development tools. In addition, there is the integration with ClearQuest and ClearCase by means of which it is possible to version every asset as well as to set arbitrary lifecycle of the same, from its infiltration into the repository through approval and all the way to its deployment and creation of new versions.
