Developer(s) Rational Software Written in Java | Initial release 2008 | |
Stable release 2.1 / June 3rd, 2016, 2016 [1] Operating system Available in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian. | ||
Rational Publishing Engine is a tool for generating documents from data stored in other software tools. Rational Publishing Engine offers an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for designing the report templates (RPE Document Studio) and for running them (RPE Launcher). Rational Publishing Engine is produced by the Rational software division of IBM.
Contents
Overview
Rational Publishing Engine is a document generation tool used to generate documents from data. The documents are generated from configuration files called document specifications in RPE's terminology. A document specification uses one or more templates which describe the layout and formatting of the document. Templates are structured around the data source schema, which is an XML-based framework for the data, rather than the data itself.
After the templates are created they can be used in document specifications that configure and generate the document. This approach allows using the same templates to generate reports on different sets of data as needed.
The document specifications support a modular approach for creating documents. For example, a document specification can use a template that contains the cover page for the document and then another template for the document header.
With Rational Publishing Engine, one can generate the report on the local computer or transfer the document generation to a server. Other remote services include administrator monitoring of document generation jobs and scheduling document generation jobs to run at specified times or intervals.
Rational Publishing Engine exposes a Java API for automating the document generation process and allows other applications to embed its core. Embedding the RPE core allows to customize the document generation user experience.
History
Originally produced by Telelogic, versions 1.0 and 1.0.1 of the product were sold as Telelogic Publishing Engine. After IBM Rational acquired Telelogic in 2008, the product was renamed IBM Rational Publishing Engine for version 1.1 and later.