New development models for IBM
IBM launched Project Zero on Friday. The aim is to provide simpler ways to build web applications using an approach termed Community-Driven Commercial Development.
The whole idea is to engage with the community of potential users to provide something that they want to use: similar to an open source project, but with a commercial license. There is a big emphasis on 'consumability' these days in IBM and this is an example of IBM changing its ways to produce more usable software.
Another new initiative, Jazz, is in contrast only accessible to IBM Rational's customers and partners plus invited others. I heard about it on a DeveloperWorks interview with Erich Gamma, of design patterns and Eclipse fame, but haven't had time to watch the videos. Anything Erich is endorsing is bound to be pretty interesting. If anyone has a link to a white paper or some such, please let me know.
19 comments:
Whitepapers are usually crap, how about a video :)?
this link works better ;-)
Hmm, I'm skeptical about this. "Community-Driven Commercial Development" sounds very much like asking people to work for IBM for free. I'm not sure whether the "community" will be motivated to make contributions to a project which is owned and controlled by IBM, and not open source.
I can't skim-read a video (and I haven't got time to fiddle with codecs so I can watch a .wmv file on Linux anyway). I only want a summary to know whether its worth booting Windows and sitting through the video. The podcast unfortunately only hints at the content of Jazz.
Dear Anonymous
http://www.projectzero.org goes straight to http://www.projectzero.org/wiki/bin/view/ so not sure what you mean by "works better".
Hi Neil
Yes, I too doubt that anyone would submit significant code patches unless they were looking to get hired. ;-)
The point of the project zero approach is to engage potential customers early enough so that their feedback can make a difference. I guess that beats a totally closed approach where small numbers of potential customers get invited to usability lab's relatively late in the day.
It'll be interesting to see how it fares relative to the open source approach which many of us know and love.
Glyn
Regarding Jazz, they made a big deal of research on this project. Here is an article from them: "Jazzing up Eclipse".
The video is worth it if you have never seen Jazz before live in action.
Thanks Antoine!
Hi Chris
I may crack in the end and watch this thing. ;-)
I am curious as to how Project Zero is different from Grails? I haven't needed to really use either, but it will be nice for when I need to consider using one.
That's a bit odd, I just ran across the QEDWiki project from IBM the other day, and it sounds a little similar, except it is more beginner friendly and doesn't require Eclipse.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/qedwiki/
I have been having thoughts on this "Community-Driven Commercial Development" for sometime. It was too large to post here, so I have posted them here: http://vineet.i3labs.org/wp/2007/07/02/community-driven-commercial-development-and-ibm/
In general I like the approach and can see IBM pulling it off, but I do have some concerns before I consider becoming a member of the communities.
hmmm... promissing. :(
http://projectzero.org/ says:
"...Software error:
flush(): couldn't store datastr: store(): couldn't close '/var/twiki/cgisess_bf5ff4084e4c0131cc62dc44ed04ba8c': No space left on device at /zerogpfs/stlzro1/wiki/lib/TWiki/Client.pm line 451.
For help, please send mail to the webmaster ([no address given]), giving this error message and the time and date of the error...."
Thanks Anonymous. I'll use the alternative link and follow up inside IBM to make sure someone is looking at the problem.
I'm not even sure how IBMers can think this is a good thing. I certainly don't.
Hi Alex
The intention of project zero is certainly not to get other people's IP for free. Like I said to Neil, I'd be surprised to see any significant IP contributions from outside IBM.
It's a completely different model to open source. I guess a different set of people will warm to it. IBM is big enough to develop proprietary products in various ways and yet stay engaged in open source where that makes more sense.
Whether project zero would have been better as open source, only time will tell.
More lively debate here.
Let me try to shine some light on the project.
We are really just getting going here. We do like aspects of Grails and may incorporate some of these ideas in Project Zero. We also like aspects of Django that might get some daylight as well.
In general, we are experimenting with some ideas on how to produce a simple web-oriented application environment using Groovy and PHP based scripting, REST/ATOM and conventions over configuration. Also, from our work on WebSphere, we really want to balance the notion of state and statelessness by utilizing a shared memory space (which we call the Global Context - GC). The GC should bring some consistency to handling transient data and local configuration in an single application context with some really nice scalability properties.
Regarding the CD/CD. I posted an entry on my blog to discuss this.
http://www.projectzero.org/wiki/bin/view/Community/JerrysBlog/WebHome
As I said, "I see it as developing in a room with panoramic windows – You can see in, we can see out…"
We feel this is a step beyond posting the technology on IBM alphaWorks in that you will be able to see the code as it is being developed, talk to the engineers via the forums and participate in polls to help guide the direction of the project.
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