IBM to bring 'Atlantic' to open-source shore

By the end of the year, IBM said Monday, it will release an update of its Rational development tool suite that will simplify creation of business applications among teams of developers. The next version, code-named Atlantic, will support the Java Server Faces specification to ease front-end Web development. IBM's modeling tools will work with the unified modeling language (UML) 2.0, the latest standard for designing applications.

The Atlantic edition of the Rational "application lifecycle" tools--used for testing, coding, modeling and other application development tasks--will be based on the Eclipse open-source software. Eclipse improves integration of tools and allows programmers to use different tools from a single programming application. IBM also said WebSphere Studio Device Developer version 5.7 will be available by the end of the month. The tool is for building Java applications that run on mobile devices, such as phones.