Features

WayPointer supports you in building J2EE systems by offering a set of designs that deals with typical challenges when designing for the J2EE platform. WayPointer supports you in:

The 'Plan Iterations' activity allows you define the iterations of your project including:

• Name and description of the iterations
• Overall objectives with each iteration
• The artifacts that should be refined in each iteration

The information is captured formally in an iteration plan, which then is made available to all WayPointer users in the project. WayPointer will then use the information in the iteration plan to provide iteration aware prioritization and guidance.

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WayPointer  allows you to create consolidated status reports across different users and activities in a project. A report is displayed on screen similar as to how an activity is displayed. The difference is that the report will consolidate checks and conclusions for all users that are working on an activity. This provides a powerful tool for assessing the true state and progress of a project. Reports can be exported to XML for printing and off-line browsing (with a provided XSL style sheet) or for further processing in other applications.

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The review-oriented activities in WayPointer allow you to create an XML-based review protocol capturing defects, and enhancements requests that are uncovered during the review. The XML-protocol can then be printed and/or browsed off-line with the help of a provided XSL-style sheet. It is also possible to integrate WayPointer directly with an external defect tracking system.

WayPointer is also integrated with IBM Rational ClearQuest making it possible to log defects to ClearQuest directly from WayPointer.

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WayPointer can be configured on different levels in different ways.

WayPointer provides a number of so called agent settings that allow you to configure the behavior of WayPointer. Many agent settings determine if and how a certain activity should be carried out, e.g., if you want to create and maintain a formal analysis model or not. Other agent settings allow you to specify local conventions for, e.g., naming of operations, documents, classes etc. Most users will find that agent settings provide a simple and sufficiently powerful mechanism to streamline their use of WayPointer. There are also agent settings that define the set of available design mechanisms, which is easy to enhance with mechanisms from, e.g., a proprietary middleware platform.

The activity 'Configure Architectural Approach' allows you to, based on project and system characteristics such as size and criticality to configure the most important agent settings in WayPointer to provide the best possible support.

With the Define Rules agent WayPointer offers support for easy creation of custom model-checking rules, e.g., to enforce enterprise modeling guide-lines. This means that you can easily create new rules to extend the predefined agents or create completely new agents to enforce your modeling standards. WayPointer also includes support for deploying custom model checking rules and agents within an enterprise, or a project.

Organizations that have made an investment in creating a formal development case with proprietary enhance¬ments to, e.g., the Rational Unified Process, can also create completely new rules and agents. Based on WayPointer there is a set of tools and mechanisms for developing agents (compiler, guide-lines etc.). These are packaged in the WayPointer development kit making it possible to create custom rules, activity agents and wizards.

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WayPointer is available in four different configurations, meaning that you can select to deploy different products for different projects or roles, resulting in lower cost compared to getting the full product for every user.

For a comparison of the different products please refer to the Product comparison.

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The rule engine in WayPointer is designed for scalability and performance. Compared to generally available business rule-engines it is in most cases several orders of magnitude faster.

The performance of WayPointer is achieved by:

• Having a compiled rule-language
• Keeping facts local to WayPointer (most notably XDE/Rose model-data) in a representation that is optimized for performance
• Having a method for doing fast incremental synchs of facts in WayPointer and the underlying tool, e.g., Rose
• Having a rule engine, that automatically caches the result of complex expressions
• Having smart rule-evaluation where, after an incremental model update, rules only are re-evaluated as necessary based on the nature of the change(s)
• Doing rule-evaluation in a background thread where evaluation of rules are prioritized in a way that will result in the maximum perceived performance for the end-user

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• Intel Pentium III 800 Mhz processor minimum (higher is recommended)
• 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended for use with IBM Rational Software Modeler and Rational XDE, 1 GB for IBM Rational Software architect)
• 40 MB free disk space
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional SP2 or higher, or Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
• Essential Modeler or, Rational Rose 2001 or higher, or Rational XDE 2003, or IBM Rational Software Modeler, or IBM Rational Software Architect 
• Rational Unified Process 2001 or higher
• Microsoft Word 2000 or higher

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