About Rational Publishing Engine

Rational Publishing Engine is currently the strategic solution within the IBM Rational division for documents publishing from various data sources. This page lists a partial set of data sources that RPE supports.

History

RPE was initially launched as Telelogic Publishing Engine 1.0, in December 2008. It was mainly designed to supersede Telelogic DocExpress as it reached end of life, by covering Telelogic data sources like DOORS and Tau. TPE 1.0 also offered a Generic XML input driver that could be used for integrating with further applications.

After Telelogic was integrated in IBM Rational, the Generic XML input driver was refined into what is now known as the REST input driver. First offered in RPE 1.1, this input driver allows data retrieval from data sources that abide to the Reportable REST interface, as defined by a draft public standard.

RPE 1.1.1 and RPE 1.1.1.1 (released in March 2010) brought further enhancements and support for a wider array of Rational data sources.

The 1.2 release benefits of Web Services and Java Script improvements with the main goal of improving RPE’s usability, reuse and consumability.

Features

IBM Rational Publishing Engine automates document generation from Rational solutions and select third-party tools. Note however that each integration has its own peculiarities that template designers need to be aware of. There is no general rule that covers all data sources, you have to have a minimal knowledge of how a particular data source exposes the information to RPE.

  • Ability to connect to any XML data source including RESTful interfaces
  • Multiple output formats (Word, PDF, HTML, XSL-FO) with complete flexibility in appearance
  • Concurrent document generation to multiple target formats from a single template
  • Composite reports containing data from multiple sources
  • Predefined templates included out-of-the-box for rapid adoption
  • An easy-to-use graphical template editing environment (Document Studio)
  • RPE currently supports a wide range of Windows and Linux flavors.

Public Interfaces

The current public interfaces exposed by RPE are:

  • Command Line Interface
  • RPE Java API
  • RPE Web Service
  • XML Definition File

These can be used for integrating RPE components in various other applications.

External References

Rational Publishing Engine Official Page:
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ratipublengi

Rational® Publishing Engine™ Actual:
http://rpeactual.wordpress.com/about/