Re: Rational Apex

["Corey Ashford" <corSPAMey@rational.com>]

Chris Warwick wrote in message <6qlci2$da7@priv-sys04-le0.telusplanet.net>...
>In article <6q8ab6$3dg$1@newnews.startext.net>, "Glenn" <gdiehl@startext.net.nospam> wrote:
>>Hello...
>>
>>Does anyone have any experiences using Rational Apex with an existing
>>"legacy" project?  We are looking into transitioning from VADS to Apex (VADS
>>support will be discontinued for the platform we are using) and I am
>>concerned that our current processes (CM, etc.) will not work with Apex'
>>highly integrated environment.
>
>I find the concept of VADS support being discontinued, and Apex being the
>replacement. The VADS compiler is at the root of the Apex environment... I ran
>into this on the Sun where our upgrade after Rational bought VADS starting the
>Sun code under Apex acting like the VADS code under SCO (this was a good
>thing as we try to do as much work as possible on the Sun before going to
>SCO, and the differences were causing a few gotchas).

This isn't true, exactly.
The original VADS Ada front-end went away, replaced by the Apex
Ada front-end.  IMHO, the best feature of the Apex Ada front-end
is the fast-path recompilation.  It's very cool, and saves an incredible
amount of time particularly when altering package specs which are on
the transitive 'with' closure of many packages.

What is retained from VADS is the optimizer, code generator, and much of
the runtime system.  The runtime system has undergone
many changes since VADS because of the need for Ada95 support.

>
>Apex is a small horde of 'C' shell scripts with a GUI on top, so you should
>have no problem customizing the enviroment to your current procedures.

Many of the scripts are "Apex_Shell" scripts.  This is a scripting
language that is similar to C shell, but much more powerful, and has
many convenient and useful hooks into Apex.

>The things that take getting used to are the directory structure required by
>Apex, and the CM system. The CM system is odd because they copy files rather
>than creating links so your developers have the impression that they have a
>local copy of all the files, whereas Apex thinks you only have instances of
>the files...

This is true, but Apex makes it look as if the files are not simply
copies.  To alter a file, you must check it out (if it was controlled,
which is not required).

There are two possible CM systems that can be used in the latest
release of Apex...  the original Apex Summit CMVC system, and the
newer ClearCase CM (which was originally a product of PureAtria,
before the two companies merged).

- Corey