Editor's note: When this article series was first published, it was based on code in an incubator project called Project Zero. At that point, the name Project Zero referred to the code and the community. The code is now available as a product called IBM® WebSphere® sMash. Project Zero is now the development community for WebSphere sMash and will continue to offer developers a cost-free platform for developing applications with the latest builds, the latest features, and the support of the community.

IBM WebSphere sMash is focused on agile development of Web 2.0 applications following Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Web 2.0 applied to SOA allows Web artifacts to extend the reach of SOA. Think of this as RESTful SOA. (Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style.)

RESTful SOA is a subset of SOA that focuses on Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and basic RESTful principles. RESTful SOA advocates the use of design patterns that have made the Web a success; it makes sense, and is to our collective benefit, to follow this pattern with application design. Benefits include:

• Scalability, through caching and stateless interactions.
• Simplicity, with prerequisites that are typically HTTP and XML or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) parsing and rendering.
• A wide-reaching "network effect" from common standards. For example, sites can consume or aggregate Atom or RSS feeds without having to know details about the content.

WebSphere sMash introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling, and executing applications based on popular Web technologies. The WebSphere sMash environment includes a scripting run time for Groovy and PHP, with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mashups, and Web interfaces.

WebSphere sMash’s goals are both technical and social. The technical goals are to provide a scalable platform that simplifies application development in three important dimensions:

Create

Simplify development with support for scripting languages (currently Groovy and PHP), conventions that promote RESTful patterns, and catalogs of reusable assets.

Assemble

Enable rapid access and aggregation of disparate services into unified applications, including data flows, orchestrations, and custom mediations.

Deploy

Provide an application-centric run time environment based upon the well known and stable Java™ Virtual Machine (JVM), which is optimized for agile development (small footprint, fast restart).

The social goals relate to the development process itself. WebSphere sMash is being developed in the open, as community-driven commercial development (CD/CD). Project Zero is the development community for WebSphere sMash. The user community can observe and influence technical decisions for WebSphere sMash. Users also have direct access to the development team and the source code itself. This level of transparency for commercial software development is somewhat new for IBM; it leads to a highly effective offering.

In keeping with CD/CD, all the information about WebSphere sMash is available at projectzero.org. This series of articles won't reveal new information about WebSphere sMash, but will give a structured introduction to the underlying concepts.