Several months ago, I promised to write about the IBM Rational Jazz platform and IBM Rational Team Concert. As you may have noticed, I have not yet write about them, but in my defense I can say that I have not had much time to devote to this nor other posts in this blog. As I mentioned in some others posts, lately I have been leading a major renovation of our entire suite of custom development tools, and these last 3 months I have been fairly busy managing all this change. Taking advantage of Easter holidays, I finally found the right time to get to write about the Jazz platform.

But before proceeding, a disclaimer. What I am going to write about Jazz is just a personal opinion, may or may not be wise, may or may not have something to do with reality, but I want to make clear that this is an entirely personal opinion, and do not mean any endorsement from my current employer.

The Eclipse vision

To describe the Jazz platform, I think we should go back to the past, because in my opinion, Jazz is trying to evolve the vision/mission/wildest dream that Lee Nackman had in 1998: to create a single technology platform on which to build the various IBM’s application development tools. The objectives Lee had at that time were:

1. to solve one of the most customer complaints: instead of having tools with their own “personality”, customers demanded a common look and feel;
2. to be able to integrate different tools, especially from IBM, but also from external ISV in order to complement IBM’s product line;
3. all reducing the development costs, as at that time each IBM tooling group used its own specific platform.

With the help from the autonomous OTI subsidiary (acquired by IBM in 1996), and overcoming an enormous amount of skepticism within IBM, Lee and his team delivered a technology platform that became what today is known as the Eclipse platform. Looking at the success of this platform, especially in terms of IBM adoption across the different brands and tools, it seems that the main objectives were reached. Not to mention also that open sourcing the platform and several projects (as the JDT), they killed lots of competitors, shrinking the Java tools market, and created a great ecosystem around it.

The Eclipse vision revisited

But the knowledge and tool set that IBM acquired when they bought Rational Software in 2002, mixed with a retrospective analysis they did based on the experience they gained in the Eclipse development, helped them to figure out which were the new challenges for the software delivery process. I’ll try to summarize, IMHO, some of the improvements they realize:

• When IBM built Eclipse, their focus was on the developer productivity. But the software development process usually involves some more skills, specialists, roles, levels, … and they need to work together, they need to share information, and when all members of the team work in a geographically dispersed manner, the conflicts inevitably appears. So there is a need to involve all the team in all the phases of the software lifecycle regardless of their location and role, and instead of improving the productivity of the developer, we need tools to improve the productivity of the entire team, and directly or indirectly, the productivity of the whole organization.
• When talking about covering the overall development cycle, we usually find that we need several tools, and sometimes these tools are outside of the scope of Eclipse. And we also find that there are lots of barriers to share resources between these heterogeneous tools, as they use private vocabularies, formats and stores. So the integration between these external tools are usually built on bridges, and lots of times, highly cobbled (so they require updates with every interface change). There is a need to raise the level of integration. We need to be able to integrate and share cross-repository information using open interfaces and a loosely coupled approach.
• When thinking about non coding activities, we realize that not each role or tool needs a heavy desktop client. There are some situations where a web UI (or another type of client) is more suitable. Despite some incubators (e4 Bespin or Eclifox), Eclipse nowadays only supports its desktop client. It’s true that using Equinox and its underlying OSGi services, you can deploy Eclipse plugins into the server-side, but there isn’t any “standard” way to share user interfaces or a framework for the web UI. Which will be the problem? the same Lee discovered in 1998: tools with their own “personality”, tools without a common behavior.
• Process, process and process. How much we love them and how much we hate them also? Why is so hard to try to follow a process? Why the only Eclipse tools available (RMC or EPF) only try to author and then publish a static document? Why tools doesn’t live the process?
• Creating a new Eclipse environment with all of the required plugins, configuring the project, setting-up the build process and all the other little pieces that come into play to give code life could be a mess for a new team member. This kind of manual tasks are tedious and error-prone, and they are perceived by developers as a waste time. So it is not strange that tools like Maven had a great adoption.

So in my opinion, and as I told previously, the Jazz platform is the evolution of the original Eclipse vision, keeping in mind the above and some more other concerns, with an special focus on teams and collaboration. But its aim is not to replace Eclipse, they are distinct platforms with different goals, although Jazz seems to be the perfect complement to Eclipse. This new vision is well summarized at the About Jazz page:

Our goal is to provide a frictionless work environment that helps teams collaborate, innovate, and create great software. To that end, we are focusing on driving fundamental improvements in team collaboration, automation, and reporting across the software lifecycle.

The Jazz Platform

When trying to describe what compose the Jazz platform, albeit IBM have split the original Jazz project in several projects at the jazz.net site, I still have some problems trying to draw the line between the platform and the applications, to see which components are part of the Jazz platform and which are part of the different products based on it. So I will try to use the below picture, that I have borrowed from the IBM Rational guys, in order to clarify my ideas:

To enable a seamless and higher level of integration between tools, IBM has defined a reference architecture, API specifications, and a set of common services and tool building blocks, that together are called the Jazz Integration Architecture (JIA). At the center of this integration architecture we found the Jazz Team Server (that may consist of one or more physical servers that act together as a single logical server), which provides foundational services (RESTful web services) to enable groups of tools to work together. Let’s summarize each of these foundational services:

• Presentation: in a multi-tool integration scenario we usually found lots of linked resources that may not be familiar to a particular client tool or this tool may not be able to provide a user interface for theses resources. The services provided by the presentation foundational services enables a client tool to find and invoke a suitable user interface for any resource URL in order to present the relevant data. There are also two main components (I believe, but I am not sure, they belong to the presentation services) that allow tools developers to implement specific user interfaces: the web dashboards component, that provides the infrastructure and UI for creating and presenting dashboards in a web browser, and the web UI component, that provides a framework for rich web user interfaces (based on the Dojo toolkit).
• Process enactment: these are the services that allows to define and implement a wide range of processes. It is focused on agile processes, but it can also be used in highly-structured processes, as it provides the essential components of a development work flow, such as operations, roles, permissions, preconditions or follow-up actions. By default, it is packaged with several process, as Scrum, OpenUp or the Eclipse Way (PDF), and it has an editor to be able to modify the process configuration. Each time you create a project you must assign a process, but you can have several projects and each project can follow a different process. It governs all activities, artifacts, artifact relationships, and operations that are pursued within the context of the process area, and it works in a seamless and unobtrusive way, as it manifests itself through artifacts types, operations manipulating the artifacts, and artifact change events.
• Administration, users, projects, teams: For dealing with users, projects, security, and licenses, each server hosts a set of core administration services. For example, these services can provide a common user identity in order to support authentication (establishes user identity) and authorization (a particular operation can be performed) based on the team membership or role in a project.
• Collaboration: Collaboration between the team members of a project can be performed in real-time, but also asynchronously (especially important for teams working across time zones). It also occurs at different contexts: around tools, process, tasks or data elements. The collaboration services in the Jazz platform supports and enables some of these core functions, for example, instant messaging, sending email and SMS, maintaining subscriptions, etc. It is something like a mix of the Eclipse ECF and Corona projects (and I wonder why they did not use these projects).
• Storage, data warehouse and search: You may have noticed that I have deliberately grouped 3 core foundation services in only one. The reason is because the Jazz repository model is composed by three logical DB in one, working together in order to provide the above 3 services. I am going to use another “stolen” picture to describe it:
  
  
  • Instead of having a fixed schema (that make integration hard) or a very generic schema (that makes writing tools tough), the Jazz repository allows tools to store their data their way. So content resources are created in a particular representation by the client, and can only be retrieved in that representation. The server doesn’t know enough about the content to transform it into an alternate representation. The storage services provides a completely RESTful framework for CRUD operations on resources stored in the Jazz private DB.
  • For every resource stored in the private DB, there are a set of “indexed properties” that are stored automatically in another DB using RDF. The indexing process is able to extract RDF triples from some resource representations and able to extract text streams from some resource representations as well. This process extracts asynchronously each tool’s data into searchable indexes, consolidates them, and provides centralized query services for searching across the consolidated index. In this way, the search foundation services are able to provide common queries, both structured queries (based on SPARQL) and full text search (based on Apache Lucene).
  • And finally, we find the data warehouse DB, a periodically snapshot of all the information, used for public reporting. The data warehouse services relies on the Eclipse BIRT project for its reporting system.

Anyway, the Jazz platform is still in its early stages, and it is constantly evolving to meet additional challenges. What I have summarized previously is what it is know as the Jazz Platform 0.6, but a new version is expected to be delivered on June with a new name, the Jazz Foundation. So if you are interested in more deep details about the above or new services that are going to be delivered, I recommend that you go through the development team wiki (registration required).

The killer-application

There is also an interesting parallelism between how Eclipse and Jazz has been developed. In order to convince other IBM’s development tools product managers to adopt the Eclipse platform, Lee and his team decided to build a Java IDE. There were two reasons behind that decision: 1) to provide a real example (a killer-application) of a tool developed on the platform, proving in that way its benefits; 2) to help the Eclipse development team to better understand the needs of future consumers of the platform and to discover areas that required further development. This strategy was a success and the Eclipse platform and the Java IDE were quickly adopted inside IBM.

The Jazz project seems to use the same kind of strategy. They are developing a real tool using the Jazz platform. This killer-application is called Rational Team Concert and as far as I know it is also rapidly adopted inside IBM. I hope to write about this product in the near future.

Adoption

Looking at the jazz.net site the increasing number of IBM tools that are adopting the Jazz platform, I have no doubt that it will be another success in terms of IBM adoption. But …

• Will it be a success outside IBM as was the Eclipse platform? IBM has not contributed the Jazz platform to the open source world (in terms of a free software license), and nor it is licensing it in any way (as far as I know). The only way to get this platform is licensing some of the Jazz based products. I am sure they are going to attract some more new customers looking for a complete lifecycle solution, but I believe it will not be a great success as Eclipse was. Anyway, I think the current goal for the Jazz platform is different from the Eclipse platform goal.
• Are ISVs going to adopt this platform for their own products? There are the usual business partners that are complementing/extending the IBM’s Jazz based products with some new features, but it does not seem that they are going to adopt the Jazz platform for their own products. And it does not seem that IBM is trying to convince them to adopt the platform, as they did with Eclipse, or licensing it on an OEMs basis.
• Will this platform attract external developers? IBM is not encouraging them to contribute in terms of code (the rights of what you contribute are transfered to IBM). They are only encouraging people to influence the direction of products through direct, early, and continuous conversations at the jazz.net website. So it will be very strange to see any non-customer developer.

So in terms of external adoption/extension, it seems that IBM is focusing only in the interface as a way to integrate non-IBM tools, encouraging developers, customers and ISVs to participate in the development of the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative, something like an open standards consortium.

Conclusion

Starting looking at the original Eclipse vision and how IBM revisited it after the Rational Software acquisition and the Eclipse success, I have attempted in this post to describe what it is the Jazz platform. I am sure some of you have realized that some of the improvements that I have described previously can be easily or are already implemented through Eclipse plugins, but I think these are the minor ones. There are three main conceptual differences between Eclipse and Jazz:

• a server centric approach instead of a local workbench in order to leverage the team concept;
• a persistent storage using a federated cross-linked repository to store resources;
• a seamless integration between tools using standard loosely coupled open interfaces and web protocols.

And in my opinion, these conceptual differences can only be implemented through the creation of a new platform. Instead of solving some particular problems in an isolated way, Jazz is trying to attack the essence of the software development process. Does it means that we must convert to a new religion, drop the Eclipse platform and adopt the Jazz platform? No, Jazz is not going to replace Eclipse. There will be a strong relationship between the Jazz and Eclipse environments, yet the
two are distinct and can run independently. Jazz is going to complement Eclipse in some particular scenarios:

Eclipse for Individuals, Jazz for Teams

We have also seen that IBM’s decision is not to open source this new platform, but to create a community around the jazz.net and OSLC websites. However, it will need to attract a broad and active participation from a wide external community in order to be a great success outside IBM, as it was Eclipse, something that I believe it is not a current IBM goal.

What will happen in the future? Sincerely, I don’t know, time will decide. From my particular point of view, this new vision match up what we have been doing for a long time and that has lead us to extend the Eclipse platform in order to create a custom collaborative tool set. So, as we are already an IBM Rational customer and we have licensed some of the Jazz products, I will be very happy if we can integrate, in an easy way, our custom tools with the IBM Rational tool set.

If you reached this point, please, participate in the conversation

Before concluding this long post, I would like to ask you:

• To the IBM/Rational guys: As I assume that I could make mistakes (history, goals, …) , if you want to add or point out something wrong, please write me, better as a comment in this post although I will also accept private emails, and I will correct it.
• To the non IBM/Rational guys:
  • How much of you have heard about Jazz? How much of you have experimented with it? Which is your (technological) opinion?
  • Must IBM open source the Jazz platform? Do you think it will be interesting and wide adopted? Why?

Additional information

PS: One of the latest tasks Lee Nackman did before his retirement at IBM, was to help spur the development of the Jazz platform.

PS: Most of the people actually involved in the development of the Jazz project were part of the Eclipse platform development team, so it is not strange to see that they are applying the same strategy, but also adopting the best practices they learned during the Eclipse development process.

PS: There is an excellent case study on IBM’s strategy and process for creating Eclipse at the Harvard Business School. It’s a worth read.

PS: Another interesting read is a paper on Collaborative Development Environments (PDF) by Grady Booch and Alan W. Brown, which seems to be the “spark” that started the new vision.

After almost a month since RSDC 2008, there is not much more to add to what already has appeared in the press. Mike MacDonagh, from Ivar Jacobson International, has also wrote a great post covering all the 22 20 9+11 product announcements and some specific posts covering in detail RQM and RRC. And Coté, from Redmonk, has published some nice video interviews. So … nothing more to add … except some silly thoughts, some photos of the playful part of the event and some curious facts I discovered just for the record.

Thoughts:

Good news: The Jazz Platform is here! Bad news: The Jazz Platform is here!

Jazz is the next generation platform for Rational products, which goal is to be for collaboration tools what Eclipse is for the desktop. With this platform, there will be a better integration between tools and, most important, a better integration in the application lifecycle. For those of us who started our career using or developing CASE tools, this concept is not new (BTW, I was introduced to this world using Softlab Maestro II). But after the failure of traditional CASE tools, only a few vendors continued to develop integrated solutions for the entire application lifecycle. Now it seems that Rational is changing its strategy and is going to embrace ALM 2.0, and this represents good news for Rational customers.

But I also think that hard times are coming for existing Rational customers. The Jazz Platform will change most of the Rational portfolio, so expect a new wave of product releases based on Jazz in the next few years (I heard something about a 10 years plan, but I can not confirm this). During the conference, I talked with several customers and I appreciate lots of excitement on them but also some worries, mainly because nowadays there are some not answered questions about which will be the future of some products (same issue for Telelogic customers). For some large IT shops with huge investment in Rational products the transition could be traumatic, specially if Rational doesn’t plan very well the roadmap.

About open-sourcing Jazz, now it is clear to me that the Jazz core infrastructure is not going to be released as an open source project, at least in a short-medium term. There have been some inaccuracies in the press, partly fueled by some statements at the RSDC 2006. At this point, I want to thank Dave Thomson, from whom I learned a lot and who kindly discussed with me (without any complaint) about OCD and open source in 3 different occasions. I think I earned the “terrible pain” title.

Instead, they announced the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration initiative, an integration architecture for tools and software development processes. Quoting directly from the Open Services FAQ: “Our goal is to enable teams to use disparate tools and share lifecycle resources in delivering software, whether the tools are from IBM, other vendors, open source projects, or in-house development. We aim to do so in a way that is open and non-proprietary and that will encourage all industry members to participate“. Ummm, I’m sure I’ve heard this statement in the past, and it is not a Déjà vu. Luckily, Martin Nally, CTO of Rational, clarified this statement telling us that this is not an AD/Cycle resurgence. But I’m not really sure, for me it’s the same concept as AD/Cycle but out of the mainframe, without a central repository / data model and using some modern protocols aimed to break the usual vendor silos. Let’s see if this time the effort will reach the necessary consensus. And talking about Open Services, I also want to thank two really brilliant guys, Pat Mueller and Simon Johnston. They explained me in detail JRS, the embryo for Open Services.

Related to the Jazz development process, Bill Higgins was kindly pleasant to introduce me most of the Jazz team leads, some of them I follow on twitter. What I discovered talking with them is that there is lots of innovation and experimentation in the Jazz development process. BTW, Bill and Erich Gamma also suffered stoically my not so innovative presentation about my company and which are our plans for the application development tools.

And finally, I also want to mention Mainsoft, one of the Rational business partners. Philippe and Jenna spent some time with me introducing a great Microsoft SPS Jazz integration. Thanks for your time! As I told to Danielle, it was really interesting.

Special events:

On Monday, there was the Telelogic Welcome Celebration event, featuring The Wallflowers. To be honest, it was the first time I heard about this band. They sound great, but definitively it’s not my preferred music style. Anyway, I listen to the concert next to Kelly, so it was a very enjoyable evening.

The Wallflowers, originally uploaded by Ferran Rodenas.

On Wednesday, there was the Universal Studios special event. I found the Fear Factor Live show really disgusting, but the Revenge of the Mummy was really funny. And quoting Mitch Fatel, here it is how Telelogic was acquired by IBM/Rational shark:

Universal Studios – Jaws, originally uploaded by Ferran Rodenas.

And finally, some curious facts that I discovered during the conference:

• Orlando is really hot, but inside hotels you could freeze to death, they are really really cold. This is something I’ve observed in several US conferences.
• Smoker’s corner and Dolphin Bar are great places to meet new friends. Bad habits that helps to socialize you.
• Despite the general belief in this part of the pond, US people love Europe. I talked to several people that knows very well Spain, and someone asked me about tourist routes by bike in the south of Spain.
• Boston and Canadian accent is easier to understand than North Carolina accent. Sorry guys, but I had to pay close attention in order to understand you!
• When you spend all the day listening and speaking a language which you are not very fluent in, you usually finish the day with a big headache. Anyway, this time I felt myself more fluent than in previous occasions, and I believe Twitter has something to do.
• Dolphin fountain is not only aimed for decoration purposes. You can swim on it. I saw more than 10 people inside!

dolphin fountain, originally uploaded by kellypuffs.

Definitively, it was a great experience! Hope to be there next year.

Exhausted after my first day at RSDC, so just a quick note.

Yesterday, my flight from JFK to MCO was delayed 3 hours and I arrived to Orlando too late. As I had a meeting earlier this morning, I haven’t slept much last night. Anyway, this morning I felt energized. I finally met Kelly and some of the Jazz guys, Bill and Patrick, in our first Blogger/Tweetup at the Dolphin Bar. And I got my very exclusive Rational Suport Moo Card!

Oh, and if you hear some rumors that I’m appearing at the WebSphere Rocks! cover magazine dressed like a guitar hero, it’s not true! Forget it!

Just a couple of days left before I flight to Orlando for RSDC’08 (IBM Rational Software Development Conference).

Two years ago I attended to this conference as a non-customer, and I was thoroughly impressed. It is always great to hear real customer case studies and to talk to other peers who share the same passion about application development tools. However, this year I am going to attend as a customer. The main difference is that as a customer you can meet some IBM/Rational key figures (and I am not referring to the R-Heroes) and attend to some reserved events. For example, this year I have scheduled some meetings with some Rational PM’s and another one with our Lab Advocate. And I have also been invited to the VoiCE event, where they are going to explain us future products (unfortunately under NDA) and where we can vent all our anger, for example, about how complicated and heavy are some of their tools. Let’s see how great the conference would be this time.

This year I am also specially excited, as I am going to meet some virtual “friends” in real life. People like Bill or Patrick, with whom I have interacted via email, chat, blogs or Twitter. And of course, Kelly, the only one, who after all these years of online interactions she deserves lots of big hugs and kisses (and not only because she set aside for me a VERY limited Rational Support Moo card). And ssshhh, keep a secret, we have both started to set up an open Twitter and Blog meetup at the Disney’s Swan bar, so stay tunned!

If you are going and you are reading this post, shoot me an e-mail at frodenas [at] gmail [dot] com or comment this post. We can swap contact info and figure out how to meet up. If you are not attending and you are interested in knowing what happens during the conference, just follow the #rsdc hastag or search for the rsdc2008 tag.

Some days ago, I wrote about a QCon 2008 session where Erich Gamma spoke about transparency and how it is related to the IBM’s Open Commercial Development model (OCD). As I have been involved since last year as a beta customer in one of the projects where OCD is been applied, the Rational Jazz Project, I want to discuss with all of you some thoughts and opinions about this software development style.

First of all, and just to be clear, I’m not going to talk about which is the license model behind OCD. The words “Open” and “Commercial”, when seen together, produces some unexpected chills and thrills, and they have generated some controversial discussions out there, mainly in the open source community (maybe, as Stephen O’Grady points out, it will be more accurate to characterize this as transparent development). In the case of the Jazz Platform, there is also some confusion, because we don’t know if IBM is going to release it as an open source software and then develop commercial products based on this platform (like Eclipse), or if they, both platform and products, will remain as commercial products. I vote for the first option, but the word “commercial” in OCD suggest me the second one.

Instead, what I’m going to talk about is how transparency in a great feature in the software development process. So go ahead.

During my career, I have dealt with lots of products, from both open and non-open source software providers. One pattern that I always find in traditional proprietary software is that you never interact with the development team; there is a barrier between you, the customer, and the vendor’s developers. If you need to report a bug or to ask for an enhancement, you can only interact with a service desk. Usually, they have a support web site, where you can see your own tickets, but you can’t see any other bugs or enhancements reported by others companies. You never know when they are going to deliver a solution for your problem (except if it is a blocker), which will be the way they are going to implement your enhancement, if there are more people interested in some enhancement, … You can only check if the bug is fixed or the enhancement implemented when the vendor delivers a new version of the product, and, sometimes, results are not what you wanted. Furthermore, sometimes, you will have to deal with lots of useless questions, mainly due to misunderstandings between you, the service desk and the development team. This is what Erich Gamma calls “Swiss bank approach to software development”.

This firewall between customers and developers is really very frustrating, not only for the customers, but also for the developers. Some companies try to supply this lack of communication organizing user’s conferences (where you can meet some developers), meetings with whatever worldwide VPs, or through a customer advocate. In some cases, frustrated users set up unofficial forums to share their problems or to try to join forces so that the vendor accepts an enhancement. They try to establish some kind of user’s community, but without the vendor involvement. In my experience, and without intention to offend anyone, you will get lots of nice words, but you rarely archive a real solution.

With open-source products, there is a really different way of relationship between customers and providers. There is an open participation and customers can influence easily in the development process in several ways. And I’m not talking about having access to the source code, which is important, but also having access to the bug tracking system, the development mailing-lists, user’s forums, and, in some cases, the development plans, all of them maintained by the development team (fewer misunderstandings). This well-known transparent and collaborative model usually produces enhanced feedback, which leads to deliver better products (in terms of user’s expectations). It’s about archiving customer value, instead of vendor value.

This is the same interaction I have found while working with the Jazz Project. I have had access not only to the source code but also to the latest integration builds (so I can check how my enhancements are implemented), a wiki with technical information about the platform (if you care about the extensibility), a community forum, the development plans and a dashboard to monitor the health of the overall project. I have had also full access to the issue tracking system, where I can submit my own bugs and enhancements, but I can also see which other enhancements are requested by other customers (and to enroll them if I found someone interesting), in which version are they planned … Summarizing, full transparency in the development process. One of the consequences is that I’ve felt, and this is personal and subjective opinion, more involved in the development process, more biased towards submitting enhancements and more confident about future problems that could appear. This feeling is nothing new if you have previously worked with open source projects, but it is something strange coming from an proprietary product.

However, there is a huge difference between open source and OCD models. While in open source software you can contribute to the code base by fixing a bug or improving some features, in OCD it is not clear which will be the contributor’s role. It will depend on the license model selected, which, in turn, it will establish if there will be a vibrant community and ecosystem outside IBM or if there will be a vibrant IBM’s customer community. Anyway, if the final decision is to keep the software as a commercial product, the transparency applied in this model it will represent a great improvement in the proprietary software development process, for both customers and vendors.

But after using this software development style for some time, I believe that this model it is not useful only to software vendors, but it also could be applied to any IT department, especially in big enterprises, in order to improve their software development process. I also believe this is one of the objectives pursued by Rational Team Concert, the first product based on the Jazz Platform (I will talk about this product in future posts). But this is something that I need to try by myself in the company where I work. As most of my readers already knows, I am in charge of the application developments tools in one major Spanish savings bank. Looking through the development process we use, I am sure that if I ask the users of the tools we develop (our internal customers) how much transparent are we, they are going to complain me. Although we meet periodically, it is hard to achieve transparency only with meetings, we need to adopt different and innovative approaches, the ones I have told you in this post.

And finally, although this is what I honestly think about transparency and OCD, I want to hear other opinions. Do you think this is a good software development model for proprietary software? Do you think this model could be applied inside enterprise firewalls?

(Via Willie Favero)

Without any buzz, IBM released yesterday Project Zero, an incubator project whose target is to provide a powerful development and execution platform for modern web applications while at the same time having the overall experience be radically simple.

Project Zero is an incubator project started within IBM that is focused on the agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and executing applications based on popular Web technologies. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

This project adopted the Community-Driven Commercial Development process, aimed to provide a more open development process encouraging greater participation from the user community, something that Jerry Cuomo, CTO for the WebSphere brand and Zero Co-founder and Project Champion, announced in the last IBM Impact 2007 conference.

Community-Driven means that we want feedback, insight, suggestions, criticism, and dialogue with you, the users of Project Zero. This interaction will yield a better solution that is more targeted at the problems you have and a technology that truly delivers on its objectives. Commercial means that this is not an open source project. We are still building commercial software here, as the licensing makes clear, but we are doing it in a more transparent fashion. This transparency provides a way for you to influence the project much earlier in its lifecycle. It also serves a role in our notions of radical simplicity. Every discussion, every technology decision, the full history of this technology will be accessible, searchable, preserved on this site. That means that finding answers to your questions will never be more than a search away. Development means that this community is about the technology and how it is developed and evolves. This is not a product community. It is not the place for the finished item, but rather the lab where it will grow.

So go to the project site, read the FAQ, download it (it’s easy using the Eclipse remote update manager) and try out the tutorials and examples for yourself. And don’t forget to share your opinions through the community forums!

(Via Andy)

IBM seems to continue to enhance IMS tooling set, this time with an autonomic management tool. IMS Tools Knowledge Base is a tool to assist DBAs to store, manage, and access reports generated from some selected IMS tools.

If you are interested in this tool, join the The IMS Tools Knowledge Base: The foundation of IBM’s autonomic direction for IMS Tools teleconference on June 26, 2007 to discuss with Joe Sacco, IMS Tools Project Manager, and Ronald Defalco, IMS Tools Senior Software Engineer, how to improve problem determination and resolution, consolidate islands of IMS tools data into one repository and build a foundation for better decision-making.

(Via Mainframe Watch Belgium)

This year I’m going to miss the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007, but … only in real life, because for the first time, RSDC will also take place in Second Life.

Check these SL URLs from June 10th to view the General Sessions, catch Rational product demonstrations, and interact with Rational experts: IBM 5 Main Tent and IBM CodeStation.

And of course, if you want to know how is the real atmosphere at RDSC, Kelly Drahzal will be live blogging this event.

Didn’t have time to post about all the buzz generated by the “Gameframe” announce by IBM:

IBM today disclosed a cross-company project to integrate the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) with the IBM mainframe for the purpose of creating a hybrid that is blazingly fast and powerful, with security features designed to handle a new generation of “virtual world” applications, such as the 3D Internet.

The other company involved in the project is Hoplon Infotainment, who runs its massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) Taikodom on an IBM zSeries Server. But the news is not that IBM is getting involved in the game industry nor the virtual worlds. As reported by the eightbar team, this is not the first time that IBM tries to run MMOG in its hardware, as back in 2005, IBM Blade Servers were being used to host Eve-Online.

The real innovation is that IBM is going to integrate CELL engines within IBM mainframes. Previous integrations were zIIP and zAAP specialty engines, but this time, CELL will be the first specialty engine to actually feature different hardware. The combination of the power of the CELL chips with the high-performance mainframes will result in a single system that can can run complex online games and virtual worlds.

BTW, last day, I was exploring the IBM SOA Hub in Second Life when I found an ATM connected to a real mainframe. Kareltje Krasher, one of the IBM guys, told me that this ATM is connected to the Smartbank zSeries infrastructure, a live banking operating environment running CICS and DB2:

Nice to see how IBM is reinventing mainframes. Long Life The Mainframe!