The ClearQuest plug-in for Eclipse enables you to perform ClearQuest activities (tasks) in an Eclipse environment. While many of you are familiar with Rational ClearQuest and/or Eclipse, this article is aimed at bridging the gap to provide you with a good understanding of the ClearQuest Client for Eclipse. For ClearQuest fans, this is an offer that is hard to refuse – save a significant amount with this sepcial deal on Rational ClearQuest Licenses.
Rational ClearQuest Client for Eclipse
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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So, how much did IBM/Rational pay you for the product endorsement / prime placement?
Jesus. This is news how?
Is this not just an ad for IBM?
And is commenting on this now a reason to get modded down? This is worse that slashdot. I hope the paid you well for your dignity.
Rational is a complete rip-off. There are far better and cheaper solutions around.
I must admit that I agree with you. I administered ClearQuest for over three years and it was nothing but headaches. Multisite is a joke and you would think that for the price it would have a little more elegant solution (mastership causes many hardships). ClearCase (with UCM) was not much better, they both require a small team to keep up and running. Add in the cost of the tools and I really don’t see why they are popular. Just my two cents.
Are comments being censored by OSNews. Two comments raised legitimate questions about how this <em>article</em> appeared and both of the comments have been modded down to -5.
Are the OSNews stuff working from IBM marketing now?
I don’t know what ppl sees in Rational software. It sucks very very badly most of the times. I’ve seen many Rational softwares, and i think the only one which is actually “usuable” is the Rose thing. The rest of their software is deadly unstable and requires babysitting all the time to make it work. Stay away from it, trust me.
Almost as much **** as OSNews did for posting this *cough* article.
I sure hope you got paid well for this blatant advertisement.
Honestly. The Rational toolset sucks. I’m -forced- to use the full gammot of ClearCase, ClearQuest, WSAD studio, everything on an enormous project with my current employer — a very large US insurance firm that shall go unnamed. The thing is nothing but a headache. ClearCase is a pain in the @ss when it comes to making changes / adding files without having bugs in ClearQuest. Having to categorize all construction when you create an action is a total pain, and limits free-wheeling a prototype in the repository with any ease.
The filesystem filters ClearCase installs to do it’s XMLRPC calls to the ClearCase server ARE SLOOOW. 90% of my rebuild time is waiting on ClearCase to refresh the status on 90,000+ files (most of which are generated and not even source controlled – clearcase dosen’t know that until it invokes RPC to determine that).
The whole thing blows from a development & productivity standpoint.
Add to it that there’s no ability to do work in the streams while you’re offline, and the entire thing becomes useless rather quickly. What? You want to take your laptop to Podunk where your parents live and do some work over the weekend? Not if you can’t dial-in and VPN to your ClearCase server. What a piece of shit.
It does have one thing going for it though — It gives me plenty of time to read slashdot and osnews while waiting for clearcase rebases, updates, and refreshes — and it’s all still billable.
I think it all depends if you have a SCM plan (software Configuration Management) in place. We use Clearcase at my workplace (the biggest telecommunications company in the US) using iterative development, and Clearcase makes creating branches and frequent merges/integrations following the SCM plan a breeze (everyting can be scripted to help doing it too).
Clearcase has the concept of “views”, which are controlled by config-specs (ruels determineing which version of files/branches to pick from the database). If you have a good config-spec (with rules indicating how to automatically create branches/etc), then you’re all set.
When I started working at this place, I wasn’t sure I would like using Clearcase, but now I’m afraid of doing anything outside of it, since it gives so much control on the development process.
Clearcase might be a pain to maintain, I don’t know (according to several posts I’ve seen on the Internet) but I think that from a multisite development team point of view (in my case, teams in the USA and Europe), with many developers, is a blessing (our developers love it). BTW, we use the Solaris and Windows clients.
Couple of answers to your comments:
1 – offline work: although I never use it, there’s a way to generate snapshot views (instead of dynamic views), so you can work offline.
2 – making changes/adding files with Clearquest ? AFAIK, Clearquest is a bug tracking system, and Clearcase doesn’t depend on it.
To add a file, I can just check out the directory, cd into it and then do “ct mkelem filename” and that’s it.
3 – VPN access: yes, you can. If you cannot do it, that’s a firewall problem, talk to your IT team (they’re blocking some needed ports).
4 – build times: 2 years ago, I would have agreed (build times, including labeling elements, took more than 8 hours). Now, we can do a full release build in less than 20 minutes (and these are millions of lines of code). Do a search on “Electric Make”
1 – offline work: although I never use it, there’s a way to generate snapshot views (instead of dynamic views), so you can work offline.
Not really. Snapshot views simply mean that the code you see sits on an ordinary filesystem and isn’t automatically updated to reflect changes. They’re not actually a solution for offline use, since all operations on files require access to the server. E.g, you can’t even edit a file, unless you’ve first told the server you’re doing so – otherwise, you end up with a hijacked file that clearcase can’t deal with.
That’s what makes using clearcase a real nuisance. Even with IDE support, refactoring code is a pain because for every file that needs changing, clearcase has to go away to the server and ask it for permission to edit that file. That’s slow, and tends to be extremely fragile.
> The filesystem filters ClearCase installs to do it’s XMLRPC
ClearCase doesn’t use XMLRPC. There are lots of reasons for poor ClearCase performance and most are fixable.
Its an enterprise SCM tool. For someone used to just hacking files, the change in mindset is significant.
ClearQuest & UCM should not slow down builds, just impose process (changes against a change request record). I would not be surprised if the Rational triggers are slow though.
It does work though. We have >300 developers at 6 sites and I don’t see any alternative.