Introducing Project Zero

Project overview

Project implementation

January 2007

Project Zero is an IBM® incubator project focused on agile development of Web 2.0 applications following the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Web 2.0 applied to SOA allows Web artifacts to extend the reach of SOA. This can be thought of as Web Extended SOA.

Web Extended SOA is a subset of SOA focused on HTTP and basic RESTful principles. Web Extended SOA advocates design patterns that have made the Web a success, so it is to our collective benefits to follow this pattern with application design. Benefits include:

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

Project Zero’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™ VM, which is optimized for agile development (small footprint, fast restart).

The social goals relate to the development process itself. Zero will be developed in the open, as Community Driven Commercial Development (CD/CD). The user community will be able to observe and influence technical decisions for Zero. Users also have direct access to the Zero development team and the source code itself. This level of transparency for commercial software development is somewhat new at IBM; we hope it leads to a highly effective offering.

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

Link to project implementation.

Learn all about the Project Zero simple environment for creating, assembling and executing applications based on popular Web technologies.

The Project Zero Developer’s Guide explains the core concepts that define the architecture of a Zero application.

Use the Project Zero Forum for help, feedback, alerts, discussion of ongoing development, and more.

Get Project Zero downloads.

Learn about Community Driven Commercial Development (CD/CD).

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