Morpheus e-Business Solutions is on a mission to take IBM's Rational message to the UK's i users.

The Bracknell, Berkshire-based web specialist is holding a series of workshops on application development with Rational Developer for System i (RDi), Rational Business Developer for SOA Construction, Host Access Transformation Server (HATS) and the all-important Enterprise Generation Language (EGL).

In February, IBM called time on both WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSC) and its Advanced equivalent and replaced them with the Rational-branded products. It also broke up WebSphere Development Studio into three separate components. As if that wasn't enough, Big Blue changed the licensing model for its i developer products. Such details are worth watching out for, according to Morpheus's Bleddyn Williams.

"Now, depending on the machine that you’ve got, you’re allowed to have a number of developers on that machine, which is a big change," he points out. "So those people who went out and bought a P10 machine for doing their development are now limited to the number of developers that they can have on there."

Licensing issues aside, long-time i-oriented web wizard Williams is enthusiastic about the new Rational toolset.

"I think if you can get past how you get the upgrade and get the licenses you need, you should definitely be moving to this as your development environment," he says. "It’s much easier to identify straight away what you want to be doing and I think anyone who’s from an RPG background would get to grips with this pretty quickly."

"When users go to RDi, they then get a whole set of enhancements on there and so there are actually some really neat things that people can be doing and some very simple things," he explains.

"One of things we were quite intrigued by -- and this might sound very trivial -- is that you can take a save file and within the RDi environment you can have a save file that’s on your PC and you can transfer it up to the 400. And then you can restore that save file and its contents on the 400 without either having to go to a command line on your Windows machine to do the transfer, or to the green screen on your AS/400 to actually restore a save file. For all those people who are sending save files back and forth, things like that are quite interesting pieces of technology."

He also explains that Rational Developer for System i uses up considerably less memory than WebSphere Development Studio Client. "IBM have based it on Eclipse, but it’s a cut down version," he says. "It really just focuses on the things you want to be doing as a developer who is doing AS/400-based applications. So there's a quicker start up, you don’t have to have such a meaty PC and you’ve not got all these things that you’re never actually going to use."

Williams says that this focus shows that IBM has listened to its customers. He points to a new application diagramming tool within RDi as another example. "You can bring your code into this environment and then it will actually map out what your application looks like in terms of structure."

Morpheus has been an Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) exponent for some time and Williams is fired up about the way it is packaged into Rational Business Developer as well as with new web service wizards.

"You can generate web service interfaces and using the wizards will generate all the code for you, so you’re not having to hand-code everything," he explains. "And if you want to put those web services around your RPG programs, you can use the wizards to basically expose those services out either to the internet or to an intranet and expose your business logic without having to worry about being someone who can do really pretty screen design, which is the important thing about this. You can take your business components, work on your business logic and you don’t have to worry about doing the pretty web page that goes in front of it."

Rational Developer for System i for SOA Construction combines Rational Business Developer, Rational Developer for System i and the HATS toolkit. Purchasing this bundle makes sense as it means that the individual components cost less than as stand-alone tools, says Williams. He also highlights an IBM website, EGL Café, that showcases what can be achieved with IBM's favoured business programming language.

"What we’ve been doing in the workshops is going in and showing what is there, just very simply, in RDi," he says. "So we connect to a system, we show how you can pull in your RPG codes that are sat in there and we show taking the save file, putting the save file up and restoring it, because, like I say, there are little things that are actually very neat in there. And then we take people through doing a direct tool from EGL into that RPG program. We show accessing the data, as though you wanted to just build an application that’s going to go through and query the data through EGL.

"And then we also show the exposure of that RPG program as a web service and then consuming that web service within EGL. So, really, it’s showing the pieces of functionality that are available to you and the kind of things that people could be thinking about, without having to put .NET applications in there, without having to do lots of different things. For most people, although there is now a cost if you want to go into RDi and there is a cost to go into RDi for SOA, it’s not actually that great when you’ve got the integration pieces in there."