IBM and Rational Software Corporation announced a strategic alliance to jointly develop and market software that will help customers accelerate the development and deployment of e-business applications. Through joint development, IBM and Rational will provide solutions that support the entire application development process to provide business process modeling, business requirements definition, visual modeling, code generation, configuration management, defect tracking, testing, deployment and systems management with tools optimized for every role on the development team. IBM and Rational are developing a roadmap to more closely integrate Rational Suite with software from the IBM Application Framework for e-business. The first result of this partnership is a new integration between IBM’s VisualAge integrated development environment and Rational Suite. This new integration is a standards-based XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) bridge between IBM’s VisualAge for Java and Rational Rose, a key product in Rational Suite. This enables full round-trip engineering between VisualAge for Java and Rational Rose, providing generation of Java code from models and models from Java. The integration is delivered as an add-in to VisualAge for Java and will be available for download on June 30, from IBM’s VisualAge Developer resource site, VisualAge Developer Domain at www.software.ibm.com/vadd to registered users. www.rational.com