 | Level: Introductory Scott Laningham (scottla@us.ibm.com), Podcast Editor, IBM developerWorks
10 Jul 2007 Jerry Cuomo, an IBM Fellow and WebSphere CTO, joins podcast host Scott Laningham and Denise Ruterbories, developerWorks editor for open source projects and the Ajax Resource Center, for an overview of Project Zero, an agile development incubator project started within IBM focused on Web 2.0 and beyond. In this 13-minute podcast, Cuomo touches on the social side of the Web, on simplification of development processes, and on the emergence of new business models utilizing the community-driven development process.
Laningham: You're listening to developerWorks interviews, where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of interest to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. I'm joined today by Jerry Cuomo, an IBM Fellow and WebSphere CTO. Welcome, Jerry.
Cuomo: Hey Scott, great to be here.
Laningham: Also with us today is Denise Ruterbories, developerWorks managing editor for open source and Ajax. And Denise is joining today on the hosting side of things, bringing her content expertise to the table. Good to have you on again, Denise.
Ruterbories: Pleasure to be here, Scott. Thanks.
Laningham: Now today we're going to talk about Project Zero. I've heard Project Zero described as community driven development, and that makes me think about alphaWorks in a sense, IBM's successful early adopter program. So Jerry, I'm wondering if you might give us just a starting sense here of what Project Zero is, if you would?
Cuomo: Yes, sure thing. So, first of all, Project Zero is an incubator that we started about a year ago in IBM. And you know, really inspired by alphaWorks and developerWorks. What we want to do is not incubate this idea completely internal and in isolation, but we want to bring it outside to the world and let a community help mold and guide the thought process as we evolve this concept that we're calling Project Zero.
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Guest: Jerry Cuomo
Jerry Cuomo is an IBM Fellow and CTO for the WebSphere brand. He is also the director of the WebSphere Technology Institute, whose mission is to cultivate the future by identifying and developing advanced technologies like Project Zero. He has spent 20 years at IBM working on advanced technology software, including breakthrough innovations in the areas of TCP/IP, real-time collaboration software, and high-performance transactional systems. Jerry is passionate about radically simplifying the consumption of middleware using appliances, virtualization, and Web 2.0 technologies. Read Jerry's blog.
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Laningham: So now I know that there's obviously a strong Web 2.0 connection here, and we've had a lot of people on this podcast talking about Web 2.0 over the last few months -- most recently, Dave Neubold from the IBM CIO technology team. But I'm wondering if you might here give us your perspective on just what Web 2 development means to IBM?
Cuomo: Yes, sure. So certainly as we talk a little bit about Project Zero, there's a strong influence on Web 2.0 on multiple fronts. And you know, what really, what is Web 2.0, it's kind of an abstract thought but concretely in IBM when we think about Web 2.0, we think about it from a number of points, points of view.
One is there's a social side, right? There's a social aspect to Web 2.0 and this notion of harnessing the collective intelligence of a community around the Web. And that's certainly one area. The other area is the notion of using the Web as a computing platform and how the world could be simplified if we can do that. And I think there's a lot of use cases out there showing how this can be done. I also think probably a third area that interests us around the Web 2.0 model is new business models, new ways to do business on the Web. And everything from open, community driven development to software as a service to subscription‑based models where, let's say, perpetual data can be looked at early and subscribed to kind of follow it through the whole product lifecycle.
Ruterbories: Jerry, you mentioned new business models as a hallmark of Web 2.0 development. Can you talk a little bit more about what this community driven development model is?
Cuomo: Oh, yes, absolutely. So I think it's a very exciting part of what we're doing and how we're conducting ourselves around Project Zero. I think there's several other examples that we're following around Software Group with this model. So the notion is, you know, I've been working, for example, on WebSphere for about 10 years. And we've done a lot of good things, very exciting things in WebSphere, and innovative things. And then in some cases, not so good things. And the history of the lessons learned in developing a product like WebSphere over the years is kind of lost to time. We don't really have a written record of how we did things in WebSphere.
There's a couple of us who have been there since the beginning and we can act as a group historian, but I think it would be good, I think interesting to our customers to see why we did things certain ways and what were the thought processes and activities to get us there. So if you can compare it to something, I would like to be able to Google the history of WebSphere and find out, you know, what happened and how we got to certain places. So part of the reason to bring development out into the open is to get the history of the project sooner than later out there so that people can see, and also influence the direction of.
So there's this notion of community-driven. So by putting the source code out there, the bug tracking systems, the engineers and making them accessible through forums and blogs, we have and can establish kind of a body of information that can be indexed and searched so that again, customers, new engineers on the project, contributors can follow that. More importantly, we can get insight beyond our own internal teams, beyond our internal architecture boards and be able to use tools like rating, ranking, polling tools to kind of query the insights of the user community. And hopefully, iterate on ideas that matter. And I kind of sometimes call this, you know, a Darwinistic approach to software development. So survival of the fittest ...
Ruterbories: Right.
Cuomo: ... where ideas are put out there, you know, kind of quickly. And the ideas that take root live on and the ideas that are not taking root, well, they kind of get pushed to the side and while we're focusing on the ideas that are taking root, those other ideas kind of, just kind of wither and go away. So it's kind of survival of the fittest. And it really builds a more agile development environment. So community development, I think, is important. Bringing this notion of agile development, getting a written record of our project's history sooner than later, so you don't need a group historian like myself to come and say how it worked 10 years later. And really getting voice of a wider community of interest to be able to influence your direction.
Ruterbories: Very good, yes.
Laningham: Because of what Jerry's saying here, the thought comes to me, certainly IBM is taking a leadership role in this to some extent, but it also sounds, the way you describe it, like we're responding to some evolutionary forces that are really demanding this across the board. Wouldn't you say that?
Cuomo: Yes, and I think we started doing this quite some time ago. You know, we were leaders and are leaders in open source. We have a number of activities going on. Our support of Linux is very clear. Our support of Apache and that organization is very clear. You know, Eclipse. So our record around open source is, you know, out there and understood. We've been the leaders in that.
Now we're trying to take it a step up which is we believe so much in the open source model, we want to apply it more broadly. Again, it's the openness and it's the direct interaction with the end user that is so important to us. So it's something we've been creating and striving to do more broadly. So we're now moving this to commercial software development and starting to experiment with doing commercial software development in a more community-driven fashion, right? So across the board, the openness of software and the openness of the software development process is something that we really believe in and we want to expand. Now it's a matter of what products do we do and how do we license the technology behind the products. So we're kind of separating the notion of being open and being free, right?
Laningham: Right.
Cuomo: We believe that free is important at different life cycles of a project, getting ideas freely, kind of exchanged; getting software freely visible and interacted with. And over time we can decide based on, you know, the nature of the project, if IBM feels it's important to not only do this in community but also have it pervasive, we'll license it accordingly. If it's something that we feel is core to our business, we'll license it accordingly. So separating the notion of open and free and making sure we have interesting models across both of them is something we've been trying to do.
Ruterbories: That's really great detail on the openness and direct interaction with developer's factors. I also heard your mention earlier that simplification is part of this whole Project Zero. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Cuomo: Yes, well let me tell you a little bit about what Project Zero is. And I think, you know, if I were to sum it up in a word, it's radical simplification. Radical simplification for building applications. And there is a book that recently came out by John Maeda from the M.I.T. Media Lab and he talks about the laws of simplification. And you know, we've been inspired by John's work and some of his laws. And one of the things that we're trying to do is apply that to application building and deploying. So Zero represents an attempt to simplify across a number of planes. One is, you know, simplifying building applications. So I mentioned before, you know, this Web 2.0 notion of using the Web as the platform, that's an important aspect of simplification.
Another important aspect of simplification is introducing the notion of scripting into application building. So using PHP or a Java based scripting technology that we've working with called Groovy. So using the Web as the platform, using scripting, using conventions over configuration, using REST and feed technologies, HTTP technologies like RSS, ADAM, as ways to express interactions with services and componentry built within this environment.
Laningham: Now, Jerry, I know you're talking about Project Zero just getting going now, the community part of it certainly. How do developers get involved? What can they do right now?
Cuomo: So right now developers can get involved by stopping by our community site which is www.projectzero.org. And they can go and read some of the documents, look at some of the samples, download the environment and try to build a couple of scripts putting it together. Trying out maybe build a set of REST services and PHP or using Groovy. Maybe share some of that with some of the engineers and that's a good way to start getting involved.
Laningham: Cool. And we'll make sure we have links to that in the show notes for the podcast and Denise I'll bet you'll be putting up some links too, won't you?
Ruterbories: Absolutely. Thanks a lot for all this great information, Jerry. This is great.
Laningham: Any closing thoughts or anything we didn't cover here, Jerry, that you wanted to mention, or Denise that you wanted to ask?
Ruterbories: I'm good.
Cuomo: I think at some level it's about state of mind, for sure. It's about behavior and how we conduct ourselves both as a company, as engineers, as technologists. I think there's certainly part of that. And when you look at the Web 2.0 movement, you know, again it's not just about one thing, it's about bringing a lot of these things together.
The umbrella term today is Web 2.0; I think over time that's going to evolve. But it's a good time to be in the IT industry because I think we're seeing a renaissance on multiple fronts. So I think that's kind of what you're experiencing here. It's not just about technology, it's about a number of things. The part that's still, you know, in IBM that we need to prove out for sure is the new business models and how that will apply. So we're talking about behavior, we're talking about technology. But I think to make this complete, I think we need to have the right business models in place and I think there's a lot of opportunity for exploration there as well.
Ruterbories: And you know, Jerry, for those developers who are in that Web 2.0 state of mind, developerWorks has a great resource called the Web Development Zone that they can visit and really dig down into the technologies and tools available. So I encourage everyone to take a look there as well.
Laningham: Yes, good point, Denise. Thanks for bringing that up. And I think this a neat topic. It's all very empowering and it speaks to a lot of possibilities of community-driven ideas and development and everything. Community is a great term. We like to bring that one up as much as possible. This has been a lot of fun today, Jerry. Thank you so much, Jerry Cuomo, for your time today.
Cuomo: You're very welcome.
Laningham: And thank you Denise for joining. Look forward to having you on again real soon too.
Ruterbories: Thanks a lot Scott. Thank you, Jerry.
Laningham: That was Jerry Cuomo, an IBM Fellow and WebSphere CTO. Also joining again was Denise Ruterbories, developerWorks managing editor for open source and Ajax. Find show notes related to this podcast at ibm.com/developerworks/podcast. For everyone at developerWorks, I'm Scott Laningham. Thanks for listening.
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About the author | 
| | Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician. |
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