Read about the new features and enhancements in IBM® Rational® Integration Tester, IBM Rational Performance Test Server and IBM Rational Test Virtualization Server that
were added in version 8.5.0 (released in June 2013).
The user documentation has been converted from PDF files to the Rational Integration Tester Information
Center. For information about setting up the information center, see https://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/rtwhelp/v8r5m0/index.jsp > Using the help.
Globalization- Rational Integration Tester has
been enhanced to provide full support for Unicode character sets.
This means that project resources, messages (and files) containing
Unicode characters will be correctly sent, received, and processed,
and that Rational Integration Tester can
use directories containing Unicode characters. Host names are correctly
translated to and from Unicode according to the standard approach.
- A Rational Integration Tester project
results database must be configured correctly to ensure that project
resources (for example, test suites) and messages containing Unicode
are stored successfully. Oracle, IBM DB2®,
and MySQL databases must be set up in Unicode mode. Microsoft SQL
Server databases must be set up to use the nvarchar type instead of
the varchar type. The Microsoft SQL Server database schema creation
script that is provided with Rational Integration Tester will create
an nvarchar based database. For Oracle, DB2,
and MySQL, refer to installation information for Rational Integration Tester to
determine how to put the database into Unicode mode.
- Rational Integration Tester and Rational Test Control Panel have
been translated into 14 languages (alongside English). Rational Integration Tester will
start using your selected operating system automatically if a translation
is available in that language. Rational Test Control Panel will
render web pages in a language based on the language details provided
by your web browser, which is usually the language of your operating
system.
- Industry standard terms, such as SWIFT and Java type names, have
deliberately not been translated. System messages intended to be read
by IBM Support, for example, exception stacks, have not been translated.
All error messages have been given a unique code, which will be displayed
in a Western alphabet to aid IBM Support.
Platforms and standards- Rational Integration Tester now
supports Microsoft Windows 8.
- Rational Integration Tester now
supports floating licenses on AIX (32 and 64 bit).
- Support for SSL connections has been added to the TCP/IP transport.
This enables Rational Integration Tester to
connect to TCP/IP services over SSL, to virtualize a service that
uses SSL, and to record (plain text) messages that are being sent
over SSL by using the HTTP/TCP proxy.
- Support has been added for Microsoft .Net 4.5 serialized objects
in messages. This enables Rational Integration Tester to
publish and receive .Net 4.5 objects that have been serialized on
to a supported transport. This functionality requires a .Net 4.5 or
later installation on the computer where Rational Integration Tester or Rational Integration Tester
Agent is
installed, and you must ensure that the .Net software is configured
correctly.
- The ASC X12 schemas supplied with Rational Integration Tester have
been updated to the 6040 (January 2012) versions.
- Rational Integration Tester, Rational Performance Test Server,
and Rational Test Virtualization
Server now
have an IBM Information Center. PDF manuals and Eclipse Help files
documentation, release notes in PDF format, are no longer supplied
with the software.
- Rational Integration Tester (client
application) is now supported on OS X. Rational Integration Tester proxies, Rational Test Control Panel (server
side), and Rational Integration Tester agents
are not supported on OS X. The functionality of Rational Integration Tester on
OS/X is limited because some third party applications do not provide
client JAR files for the operating system.
- Rational Integration Tester support
for WS-Security encryption has been improved significantly:
- WS-Security headers can now be encrypted on publish.
- Stubs and subscriber actions can decrypt SOAP messages that are
encrypted with WS-Security (assuming that keystores are configured
correctly configured). This means that it is now possible to virtualize
services that receive and must respond with WS-Security encrypted
messages.
- With appropriate configured keystores, it is now possible for
Recording Studio to decrypt WS-Security encrypted messages automatically
and to present the plain text content to users as they are recorded.
- Rational Integration Tester now
supports all of the UN/EDIFACT schema dictionaries. UN/EDIFACT (United
Nations rules for Electronic Data Interchange for Administration,
Commerce and Transport) is a set of international standards, directories,
and guidelines for the electronic interchange of structured data.
Earlier releases of Rational Integration Tester supported
a subset of dictionaries using an older technology. Rational Integration Tester 8.x
still supports the older technology but this support will be removed
from future releases of Rational Integration Tester and
it should not be used to build new tests. The newer schema, UN EDIFACT,
supports dictionaries up to D11B. The older schema, EDIFACT/ISO 9735,
has only A dictionaries to 2006.
Virtualization- You can now use Rational Integration Tester to
intercept, record, and virtualize Java method calls. This enables
you to virtualize services when middleware technology is unavailable
or too expensive to acquire, or when other Rational Integration Tester virtualization
capabilities do not support a particular middleware technology.
- It is now possible to record and virtualize calls from one IBM CICS® program to another when they
are accessing each other by means of the distributed program link
(DPL) technology. This enables anyone testing CICS programs to create
virtual services that represent downstream CICS programs and thus
simplify test environments, or to test when CICS programs are not
yet available. CICS DPL virtualization is available on CICS V4.2 and
V5.1. To use this feature, a patch must be installed on the CICS system:
- You can now virtualize an IBM DB2,
Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL database accessed by means
of JDBC without requiring a second schema of the same database type.
This is achieved by selecting the integrated simulation database option
when creating a database stub. This option uses a database built into Rational Integration Tester or Rational Integration Tester
Agent and
enables virtualization of non-vendor-specific database access (tables
and stored procedures). Stubs built using this option still maintain
database state and can be edited just like normal database stubs.
If you need to virtualize database access that uses vendor-specific
SQL, the alternative second schema approach will still provide the
best overall experience.
- When creating a performance test in Rational Integration Tester,
it is now possible to select stubs to run from Rational Test Control Panel in
the same way that you can for test suite scenarios. When the performance
test starts, the stubs will be started on Rational Test Virtualization
Server agents.
When the performance test stops, the stubs will also be stopped. You
also have the option of locking the Rational Test Control Panel environment
for the duration of the performance test.
IBM Rational Quality Manager- In the Rational Integration Tester and Rational Quality Manager integration,
execution parameter passing has been enhanced. You can chain together
multiple integration tests in Rational Quality Manager so
that the output of one test can be input into another test. You can
manage parameters by using the Rational Quality Manager user
interface. When you are executing tests on agent computers, you can
send input parameters and receive output parameters. You can set parameter
passing for single tests or for multiple tests.
- It is now possible to configure a Rational Integration Tester
Agent such
that it can be used by multiple Rational Quality Manager projects
to run tests. In earlier releases, an agent was required for each Rational Quality Manager project.
IBM System z- Sift and pass through technology is now available for virtual
services based on the interceptor-based message redirection for IBM WebSphere® MQ queue
managers running on System z. This technology, which was introduced
for the distributed WebSphere MQ platform
in Rational Integration Tester 8.0.1,
enables virtual services to run at the same time as the real service.
Sift and pass Through technology ensures that the virtual service
will always get the message first and can determine whether to process
it or allow it to "pass through" to the live service. This enables
you to build more sophisticated stubs that can delegate to the live
service if the message is not relevant to a test case.
DevOps/Continuous integration- Rational Test Control Panel now
offers an OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) interface,
which can be used by other applications to discover, stop, and start
stubs. Rational Quality Manager 4.03
has built-in support for this OLSC interface, so Rational Quality Manager users
can use Rational Test Control Panel to
discover virtual services associate those stubs services with assets
in Rational Quality Manager. Rational Quality Manager will
then use the OSLC interface to start the stubs automatically. For
example, Rational Quality Manager can
be configured to start a set of stubs at the beginning of a series
of tests to provide virtual services against which the test cases
can run.
HP Quality Center- A new type of integration between Rational Integration Tester and
HP Quality Center 11 offers significant performance improvements over
the previous integration when running Rational Integration Tester tests
from Quality Center. When you define the test environment to use for
test execution, you can now define the test execution method (running Rational Integration Tester instance
where you base the test run on a specified Rational Integration Tester project,
or command line) and log level settings (off, severe, warning, info,
debug) to decrease run time and to provide only the desired level
of log information.
Usability enhancements- In the Recording Studio perspective of Rational Integration Tester,
you can now use Find to search message bodies in Recording Studio.
This enables you to identify quickly a message (based on content that
you know is in the message body) when creating tests or stubs from
recorded messages. This is particularly useful when working with the
Java virtualization functionality included in Rational Integration Tester 8.5.0
because a large number of method calls may be recorded during each
recording session.
- As part of the Unicode compliance improvements, record layouts
have been enhanced. In earlier releases, all record layouts assumed
that strings were ASCII based and thus unsuitable for working with
Unicode. There are now three types of record layout:
- All record layouts created in earlier releases of Rational Integration Tester will
be assumed to be of type ASCII. With ASCII, a character is assumed
to always be one byte. You should not use this type to create new
record layouts unless you are certain that messages to which the record
layout will be applied will always be in ASCII.
- The string type allows you to define only character-based elements.
All record position/lengths are defined in terms of the number of
characters, not the number of bytes. This enables Unicode characters
(which are of varying byte lengths) to be used consistently within
a record layout.
- The byte type does not allow character-based elements to be defined.
All positions and lengths are defined in terms of byte positions.
Characters/strings are not allowed, so Unicode has no meaning for
this type.
In addition, you can now assign a namespace to a record layout.
This provides for grouping in the Schema Library view of the Architecture
School perspective and also enables you to set up rules in the Rule
Cache that will apply only to specific record layouts.
- The user interface controls of Rational Integration Tester 8.5.0
have been upgraded. Although the overall level of functionality of
the user interface has not changed, there are some visual changes
and switching between perspectives is now faster.