My latest Rational piece is up on the IBM site. This is an update of the series I co-wrote last year on using a suite of Rational tools for your development projects. The latest series focuses on the new Rational Application Developer and Rational Software Modelere, which are based on the new Eclipse 3.0 platform.

Developing applications using the IBM Rational Unified Process is a lot easier if you have the tools to help you throughout the process. The Rational family of software offers a range of tools that on their own provide excellent support for each phase of the development process. But you can also use the different tools together to build an entire application. By sharing the information, you can track components in the application from their original requirement specification through testing and release. This first part of a five-part series shows how to use Rational RequisitePro to manage and organize the requirements specification for a new project. Then, after you’ve developed your unified list of requirements, the tutorial shows how to use Rational Software Modeler to model your application based on those requirements.

You can read the full article. If you’ve finished it and want more, check out Improved application development: Part 2, Developing solutions with Rational Application Developer.