Ask Jazz Technical Lead Dr. Erich Gamma 83
As IBM continues to build out Jazz, their community-oriented development site, technical lead Dr. Erich Gamma has offered to answer questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Among his many accomplishments, Erich worked with Kent Beck on the Java unit testing framework, JUnit, and was actively involved until JUnit 4. Dr. Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools. Feel free to fire away on Eclipse, Java, JUnit, the Rational suite, the Jazz site, or anything else you think Erich might be able to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. Update 19:05 GMT by SM: As pointed out by user Hop-Frog, Dr. Gamma is also co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
Re:I can't figure out what Jazz is... (Score:3, Informative)
I can't speak for all of Rational or all of our users, but I can speak as a member of a development team that uses Rational Team Concert. When we were building what became Rational Team Concert (the first Jazz-based product), we made it an early priority (like 2 years before we shipped 1.0) that we would use Team Concert for our day to day development of Team Concert. Since we build Jazz and Team Concert from the ground up (read: from scratch), the early days of self-hosting were very painful, but because of this pain and the commitment of our developers to make continuous improvements, it's turned into a very useful well-integrated tool over the past couple of years.
We've had very good internal grassroots of Team Concert within IBM (I can't speak about customer uptake) and have received very positive feedback from customers and fellow IBMers about what we've done and where we're going with Jazz.
It's certainly not perfect and there's much more to do, but I assure you that Jazz is useful technology. It's not simply a "fancy marketing scheme for Rational products". Maybe try it out and judge for yourself.
Thanks,
Bill Higgins (bhiggins@us.ibm.com / http://twitter.com/BillHiggins [twitter.com] / http://billhiggins.us/ [billhiggins.us])
Re:I can't figure out what Jazz is... (Score:3, Informative)
Here's how I would explain Jazz to another developer if I ran into him or her at a conference:
"I work on a technology at IBM called Jazz. What we're trying to do is make it easier for teams of people to build better software by making it easier for them to collaborate together. We're building a core technology stack ("Jazz") and we're building a bunch of products on top of it that address different parts of the software lifecycle - e.g. requirements, development, testing, build, move to production. If Jazz is going to succeed as a platform, we have to make it very possible to tie a lot of data together. You see, one of the things that we've learned is that it's not physically possible for human beings to build a single tool that solves every problem - the complexity is too great the interdependencies between components is too brittle. We believe that the only way all of these tools are going to work together is to define simple standard protocols and simple standard formats (open service for lifecycle collaboration - http://open-services.net/ [open-services.net]) built on top of standard Internet and web protocols (like http) and formats like AtomPub. Our Jazz-based products integrate together using this sort of loosely coupled web style and we're starting to integrate with business partners as well. Another thing I like about working on Jazz is the fact that we develop in the open at Jazz.net. Many of the leaders on our project like Erich Gamma, John Wiegand, and Dave Thomson came from Eclipse, and from that experience they came to realize that software turns out better when you open high-bandwidth direct channels with your users and extenders, so we're doing that with Jazz, even though it's commercial software."
That's about as simple as I can make it. I'm not sure if you're trying to understand or just to throw stones. If you'd like to learn more, there's some good info at Jazz.net, we're on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/IBMJazz) or you can find a bunch of us on Twitter. http://jazz.net/community/twitter/ [jazz.net]. If you still think it's a bunch of marketing B.S. then that's that, but we have quite a few happy users, and we're working hard to make it better.
Trying to help... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe it's hard to summarize in a couple of sentences because Jazz really is a number of things. I'll try to describe each of them in one to three sentences. And I'll try not to use marketing buzzwords, although I can't promise not to use URLs.
1. Jazz is the belief that professional software development is a team effort, and the part of that effort that tools in the past have supported least well is communication and collaboration between team members. Tools in the past treated communication more like a ceremony than a conversation. That's just wrong.
The question that Erich and his colleagues set themselves was: what can we do to make it easier to work as a team? So the features that you find across Jazz tools include things like team awareness, status tracking, newsfeeds for things like build completion or test pass/fail, and so on.
2. Jazz is also platform or technology stack that provides common services like storage, query, events, process, collaboration, etc. to tools built on top of it. Middleware for tools, if you like. It relies heavily on Eclipse technologies including OSGi. Rational Team Concert is one example of a tool built on the Jazz platform, there are many more.
3. Jazz also is an integration technical architecture that uses RESTful interfaces between tools, whether those tools are on the Jazz platform or standalone. Links between artifacts are simply URIs. It's designed to be, yes, loosely coupled and web-style. What that means in practice is that you don't have brittle connections where upgrading one tool breaks the integration with another. It also means you don't have to consolidate everything into one repository. The open part of that integration is OSLC, which is where we are developing specs for integration, i.e. metadata definitions in XML and JSON plus service interfaces, in plain sight and publishing them under Creative Commons so that anybody can consume them to integrate with our tools -- or, heck, without our tools if they want to. Anybody can also participate in the spec process -- there's no membership fees or purity test, and the only requirement is a willingness to disclaim patent enforcement against anybody who implements a spec.
Does that help?