On April 29, 2008, IBM Rational announced the availability new 7.0.2 versions of IBM Rational Performance Tester and IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality. This release continues the evolution of the Rational quality management portfolio with the introduction of new environment support, scalability and usability enhancements.
Users of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications such as PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel and Oracle have long been using IBM Rational Performance Tester to validate the scalability of their applications and find their performance bottlenecks. In the new v7.0.2 version, Rational Performance Tester introduces new support for load and scalability testing of:
- Siebel 7.9 and 8.0 applications, and
- SAP JCo Batch input processes
In addition, Rational Performance Tester adds new:
to its list of supported protocols. With the addition of socket support, users will have the ability to test a long list of internet standard protocols that leverage raw TCP sockets for communication such as LDAP, FTP, SMTP, POP or other proprietary TCP based protocols. Users testing web service based service oriented architectures will benefit from IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality’s new support for:
- SOAP 1.2
- Asynchronous web service calls
- Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) attachments
These new enhancements provide testers with the functionality required to validate applications using ever evolving technologies.
In order to fully validate application scalability, quality assurance professionals often require the ability to execute long running performance tests. These tests pose unique challenges in terms of resource management and results data collection. Rational Performance Tester v7.0.2 has been optimized to empower testers to execute tests whose durations can span minutes, hours or days. Data collection has been optimized for such tests making it possible to easily manage the large volumes of data in order to identify the presence and cause of performance bottlenecks.
Both Rational Performance Tester and Rational Tester for SOA Quality have introduced features to simplify usage and make users more efficient and productive. Some of the enhancements in this arena are:
- New wizard for web service test creation of SOA applications
- New functional web service test reports for SOA applications
- New Smart Load scheduling to facilitate the creation of performance tests with programmed user volume increases and decreases
- New line speed emulation to simulate varying connection speeds during performance tests
- Simplified performance test debugging with real time rendering and comparison of server responses
Free 30 day trial evaluation downloads are available from IBM developerWorks:
Download your copy today to experience how Rational's Quality Management portfolio delivers continuous process, powered by automation to govern software delivery.
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