DOORS and DXL as a profession

SystemAdmin - Wed Mar 07 02:49:54 EST 2012
Possibly the most disruptive future plans for DOORS to be aware of is that DOORS is undergoing a major change to migrate it over to the IBM Jazz platform. click here to learn more about IBM's "Rational DOORS Next Generation"

On one the web pages for "Rational DOORS Next Generation" there is an interesting statement - "In the first release of Rational DOORS Next Generation, customers will not be able to run scripts written in DXL; we intend to reintroduce this support later"

I don't like that word "later" - might not happen. I recommend that anyone seeing this that they have a good read about "Rational DOORS Next Generation", there is a fair bit of back peddling about migration and other things that were promoted differently not so long ago.

I think it's self evident that DXL will eventually have to go, it's amazing it's lasted this long, and customisations will be done via one of the more contemporary scripting languages such as JAVA, PERL and so on.

llandale - Wed Mar 07 16:45:16 EST 2012
One of the DOORS reps here said they cannot do away with DXL since there is so much software written in it. COBOL is still around.

On the other hand, not sure how that weighs up against the reasons DXL must go by the other responders.

On the other-other hand, if we do away with Modules and Objects and Links and History, then I think the end result will be something other than "DOORS". Seems to me IBM bought DOORS because folks like it and it doesn't seem reasonable to me to just can it. If DOORS NextGen doesn't have a look and feel of DOORS v9 then its not really "DOORS"; and if it does have the look and feel then DXL should generally still be suitable.

-Louie

SystemAdmin - Mon Mar 12 05:26:37 EDT 2012
Hi,

Thanks guys for the detailed information, I hope IBM will look into these aspect while releasing DOORS NG. As per the replies to this message I understood there is still 5-10 years of life to DOORS v9 and DXL, by then I hope DOORS NG will have DXL support.

Thank you.

BillTidy - Mon Dec 10 10:38:50 EST 2012
If you look at the youtube presentations on DOORS NG you can see they talk about moving "Business Logic" from the client to the server. "Business Logic" means DXL (in DOORS pre-NG versions).

I doubt whether it will be DXL as we know it but they sure need something at least as powerful or there is no reason for many end-users to go to NG because the major advantage DOORS has/had was DXL capability to tailor DOORS out-of-the-box to suit your business rules (and make admin tasks easier among other things). I would think practically all companies using DOORS have written DXL or downloaded shared scripts from the web - and plenty of them are using A LOT of DXL.

If there is no DXL or DXL-equivalent in DOORS NG then I expect many end users will just move to another cheaper tool when support for DOORS 9.x is ended. The look-and-feel of DOORS NG has already been long implemented in plenty of other tools, so that gives zero advantage (IBM is playing catch-up in that respect). IBM should not forget the need for tailoring and offer some kind of migration path from DXL if "Business Logic" is implemented in another way in DOORS NG, e.g. in Java.