I’ve been stuck in the dark ages slightly here, but this morning I made the move from WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) 5.1.1 to Rational Application Developer (RAD) 6. The reason I’d delayed was that I had a whole stack of projects running within WSAD and was expecting more pain in moving them across to RAD. Moving, in the past, from Visual Age for Java to WSAD 4 and then WSAD 5 caused me much more of a problem. With RAD, however, it was all fairly straight forward.
Once installed, I made backups of my WSAD workspace directories, pointed RAD to the WSAD workspace directories and they all sorted themselves out. There’s probably a more prescribed, measured and safer migration route, but I always tend to favour the patented “try it and see” approach. There were a few error messages on doing this, but after starting itself up the next time it had sorted everything out.
First impressions are very good, it doesn’t have a small memory footprint, but I wasn’t really expecting anything else. You do need a fairly beefy machine to do some serious J2EE development, even so It actually feels faster than WSAD. It has a few nice extra auto code fix features which always come in useful. Oh and I love those nice new curved window tabs.
I like the “try it and see” approach too, mostly because I hate bugging people for help and I think you learn more when you try to figure out stuff yourself. Although I guess it would make more sense if I at least tried to read some books or documentation to learn how to do stuff rather than to use some stupid trial and error stuff that just wastes time. I’ll think about that for next time.
Anyways, I didn’t know of an easy way to convert WAS 5.x apps to WAS 6.x…I was basically looking for a menu item or button that said, “Migrate to WAS 6.0″, kind of like Eclipse has that “Migrate to 3.0″ menu item to convert 2.1 plugins to 3.0. Since I didn’t find anything like that (and I didn’t bother Googling for help), I just tried to fix the 5.x apps to work on 6.0, but I gave up because it was taking too long and I ended up just creating new apps in RAD and copying the code and other stuff over. I left it up to RAD to generate the new web.xml, but I couldn’t exactly cut and paste the xml over from 5.x because there are some minor schema changes. I decided to re-add stuff to the web.xml using the gui, but it’s really annoying. Do you know how to edit an init param through the gui after you’ve entered it? Yeah, I don’t know.
Comment by nerdwannabe — September 1, 2005 @ 3:45 am