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.
I can't figure out what Jazz is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Reading the About page is useless. The impression I get is that this is a fancy marketing scheme for Rational products. Which, is business as usual for Rational...they market well to managers and are more trouble than they're worth to the people that have to actually use them.
Re:Patterns (Score:2, Insightful)
Just thinking if I was to write up a quick bio ... man, I'd start with patterns ... Surprised me that wasn't even in there.
Re:The Directions of the Eclipse Foundation (Score:5, Insightful)
Plugins.
Eclipse is an awesome platform for Java. As good as Netbeans. Over the years I've checked it out and I've never felt the desire to stay with it like I do with Netbeans.
But when it comes to developing in other languages, Eclipse just doesn't cut and Netbeans blows the doors off of it.
Some examples:
When I downloaded the previous version of Galileo, from the menu I installed the plugins for C++. I couldn't get the C++ compiling and linking to work.
BPEL?!?! They wanted me to GO BACK a couple of versions of Eclipse. I couldn't even find it on the net.
Anyway, that's not the Eclipse foundations problem. What is their problem is the dependencies installation of the plugins. There's been times where I try to install a plugin and after a while it says I need another, the that dependency says I need a couple of more, and then those dependencies say I need more, and eventually, one dependency fails. Spent a couple of hours over that. What can't Eclipse do all that horseshit for me?
There's other things that I don't like about the UI and the way Eclipse handles projects and their dependencies in Java. I went to Netbeans six months ago and never looked back. I am very happy with Netbeans and I don't see any reason to try to go back to Eclipse.
Re:Patterns (Score:3, Insightful)
Buying in to Rational Products (Score:2, Insightful)
According to the NRC's Singer, the chief constraint that Jazz faces is that it works only on the Eclipse platform. Says Singer, "The only people who can adopt it are those who are using Eclipse."
Singer also feels that some processes might not accommodate Jazz's idea of collaboration. "People use all sorts of tools and ways of communication to coordinate their work, to be able to collaborate, to be able to put together big pieces of software," she says. "Some of this has to do with following a particular process. Where Jazz might be constraining is when the model behind it does not jive with these preexisting processes."
Meanwhile, Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, told eweek.com last March that IBM developers account for as much as 80 percent of Eclipse's development team. He questioned whether that kind of environment is good for Eclipse or Jazz. He also noted that some have charged IBM with killing off the Jazz developer tool competition with Eclipse. Finally, he wondered whether having two open source communities--one for Jazz and one for Eclipse--will ultimately weaken Eclipse.
I'm not sure but I would wager that's as true today as it was in 2007. How do you address those concerns?
... or if I want to use Composer I have to use Concert and Manager. But it would then seem that collaboration is only being aimed at a very certain type of developer. This may be a "loaded question" but is IBM hoping Eclipse will become the be-all-end-all integrated development environment? I know Flex Builder and Workshop are already built on top of it, is world domination in sight?
I've also noticed--through use of the Rational Suite--that you can't just use one tool in the suite. You need them all. And, you know I understand it's IBM's business model, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that I was using all these great Maven2 tools to do releases and automagically test and build inside subversion. But when we went to ClearCase, we had to do releases through ClearCase and our test and builds through CruiseControl [sourceforge.net] and I never found any plugins for Maven2 to ClearCase. ClearCase was really too much for such a small team. We had to bring in an administrator part time who had 20 years of ClearCase experience and the team just complained non-stop about moving off subversion. Why is everyone trying to "own" the whole stack? Why can't I recognize one Rational product is great and just use that and integrate it in with the rest of my tools? It seems like if you buy one you soon find yourself buying them all. Great for IBM but not always what we need. Is Jazz the same way?
I mean, it's fine if the answer is that if I want to use Jazz I have to use Eclipse
Re:I can't figure out what Jazz is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading the About page is useless. The impression I get is that this is a fancy marketing scheme for Rational products. Which, is business as usual for Rational...they market well to managers and are more trouble than they're worth to the people that have to actually use them.
You describe the very experience I had. Our manager decided we were going to do Rational. We spent lots of time and money on training, hardware, installation services, etc. Everybody hated it. The developers would deal with the ClearQuest windows interface okay, but when we tried to get the users to report issues using the web interface, they revolted, and so we developed our own solution with integration to the CQ back-end.
When ClearCase worked and everybody followed the plan, it was okay (but a HUGE resource hog, and nobody could work with it over VPN). But administration took a *lot* of time. On more than one occasion a computer would be re-imaged or a consultant would leave, and "checked-out" files that people needed were locked (meaning you can't even get a snapshot), and digging through the VOB to fix an issue like that was a PITA, even with some of the scripts I developed to deal with that and other issues.
Don't even get me started on all the crap we had to deal with using Rose. Some of the developers even started trying to do round-trip engineering. That was my 2nd experience with software that promised to do that and failed miserably (the first was Oracle Designer). Maybe it will be useful in the future. Here's a hint if you've never tried it yourself: get your design as close as you can, and generate your starter code from it, but if you think you're going to get an updated model after you've been coding for more than a couple of days, you're in for some major disappointment.
When that manager left, we started migrating to SubVersion, Trac, and some home-grown tools, and threw away just about everything else other the Requisite Pro (still too much documentation "locked" into that tool). It took us almost 2 years to extricate ourselves from that bloated garbage. We're much more productive now, though.
Rational? (Score:3, Insightful)
I work in a small shop that makes some use of Websphere Application Server and the Rational development tools. I basically find the entire structure of the IBM software offerings relating to the above technologies incomprehensible. Products are constantly being renamed, discontunued, bundled, unbundled and rebranded. Names are long, generic, and practically interchangeable, and so are the feature lists.
How do you plan to run a community support site based around this hodge-podge? I would assume the volatile nature of IBM's software marketing makes your task something approaching impossible. How do you expect to build a strong developer community based around products that are in a constant flux? I don't see any way around ending up with a large number of granular, isolated communities that spring up around specific products and thrive for a year or two. In short, how do you plan to unify a developer community without IBM first unifying the software development platform that this community is to be built around?
Thank you.
Re:I can't figure out what Jazz is... (Score:1, Insightful)
Is Jazz a technology, an initiative, a website, a community, or a platform? If it's not too late, you should push to have the ambiguity of the name eliminated. Slapping a "Jazz" label on everything is not going to serve you any better than when Microsoft tried to slap the label of .NET on everything. If it is ultimately a technology, clearly state that, and clearly state what it does. And get that information on the front page! Don't burry it under the layers of marketing speak.
Let's try this. .NET really was: A VM (sort of), new programming languages, and a comprehensive standard object library.
Now, fill in this blank.
Jazz is: _______________________
Re:Silly Stuff (Score:3, Insightful)