About The First Windows IBM IDE : Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi)
It's time to talk about IBM Rational Developer for IBM i
What is RDi?
An integrated development environment (IDE) built on the Eclipse platform, designed for creating and maintaining applications on IBM i systems.
Pointy heads at IBM
This basically means Rational Developer for IBM i (commonly known as RDi) is IBM’s flagship integrated development environment for the IBM i platform.
The product isn’t universally used across the IBM i community, because it’s not free. It's actually very expensive (IMHO of course) and those software developers that can afford it enjoy the productivity improvements they get from a graphical and modern IDE, particularly compared to older greenscreen coding environments like PDM and SEU.
In the past I may have answered something like “PDM and SEU are old and Rational Developer for i is a modern tool for RPG and COBOL development.” With the exception of a few leading-edge IBM i developers, this answer generally doesn’t go over very well (much the same way that I’ve learned “Because I said so” doesn’t work that well with my kids).
What is RDi and Why use RDi?
The short answer to both these questions can be summarized as:
- Improve developer productivity
- Common development tools platform
- Improve developers skills