So, I've got up at 6 for the analyst breakfast, after having heard Bob Dylan's son play at the RSDC Telelogic Welcome Party last night (he's not a patch on his Dad IMHO)—but what did I see at RSDC that I didn't expect to? That's always the icing on the cake at these things, for me.

Well, the IBM Labs section, showcasing interesting research projects on the Jazz and Eclipse platforms that may or may not make it into product, was great fun.

IBM Rational Business Developer was one such, using EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) to generate client-side Javascript applications for running in a browser.

Very slick and easy, but it's EGL that reallly interested me as an ex IBM OS370 Assembler programmer, I was horrified at the return to "assembler" (with C++) in the 1990s. My favorite language was then ReXX. Now, EGL may signal a return to higher level languages. You write and debug your EGL code and then generate the programme for 1 or many target systems. So you write one piece of code and can produce Java, COBOL etc. solutions ad lib. See this book for more details.

Another interesting find was a quartet of Software Development Governance products on Jazz: Financier, for assessing the dollar value of even part-completed software; Governor, for defining project roles and decision rights; Tempo, for managing the sources of scheduling variability; and Ensemble for promoting better developer communications for people working on related assets. I had an intersesting conversation with Perri Tarr, a research staff member at Thomas J Watson Research Centre in NY about some of the implications and requirements around Governance (the avoidance of over-governance and provision of feedback loops eg), which helped convince me that Jazz is going to be an extremly rich developer tools platform.

It seems that there will be soon be no shortage of tools for developers. The issue, perhaps, is will they know how to use them or whether they should be using them, particularly if they fall outside the traditional coding space? I do hope that IBM can come up with "good practice" templates and patterns for inclusion "in the box"—but I think it will.

Blog: IBMRSDC08

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