IBM is pushing its Jazz developer collaboration technology as a research tool and has given money to some universities that are researching how to break down cultural and geographic barriers when developing software…. Three universities were awarded the grants to help drive the software community’s ability to think beyond the individual developer to organizational productivity. The University of California, Irvine, is exploring the use of multi-monitor environments to improve project awareness and development practices. Two other awardees, the University of British Columbia and University of Victoria, both in Canada, are embracing the collaboration capabilities of Jazz and researching software development team interactions and communication.eWeek: IBM Touts Jazz for Research
In its research, the University of California, Irvine is exploring the use of multi-monitor environments to improve project awareness and development practices. To date, software engineering tools are designed under the assumption that they must effectively operate on a single monitor on a developer’s desk. The trend, however, is to equip developer’s desks with multiple, typically larger monitors, and to equip community areas with tiled displays through which vast amounts of information can be shared. This research leverages Jazz technology to explore how software development tools should be (re)designed to take advantage of this extra display space, with a particular focus on project awareness. The Jazz platform provides many hooks and listeners through which the information that the visualizations need can be obtained.
Along the way to hardware that is really fluid and adapable, software is weaving its way deeper and deeper into the hardware. A couple of writers envisioned the next near-term steps earlier this year:
… virtualization technologies should be pushed down further into the iron and sold in volume. In short, there should be some way to make these technologies a low-cost part of the system, … it should be made in an on-demand fashion, activated with a key for a nominal fee, complete with physical-to-virtual conversion tools and virtual-to-physical tools to undo the virtualization if customers decide to do that, too.
The effect of free, hardware based virtualization which is automatically there would make for very interesting x86 servers. Even more so with a few on-board, fully virtualized, multi-fabric I/O channels. Kind a baby mainframe.
Maybe it’s a crazy idea. Maybe its a vision of the future of computing.
Now, in the aftermath of the VMWare IPO, we’re seeing it unfold.
“With virtualization, where you can run any operating system on top, it seems a lot more logical that it would be effectively a layer sitting on top of a server,” said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. “Why wouldn’t it be supplied with the server?”
XenSource announced XenExpress OEM Edition last week, and market leader VMware this week is announcing VMware ESX Server 3i at its VMworld conference. The products run from flash memory built into a server instead of being installed on the hard drive.
The embedded versions aren’t just a fantasy. VMware has partnerships with IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance. “We expect them to begin integrating ESX Server 3i into their servers later this year or early next,” a VMware representative said.
The move has strategic importance in these relatively early days of virtualization, elevating the profile of virtualization specialists’ products. Getting a foot in the door could help the virtualization specialists get a foot in the doors of customers who might be interested in higher-level products to manage the increasingly sophisticated computing infrastructure that can be built atop virtual machines.
Virtualization has been around for decades, but its inclusion in mainstream computers with x86 chips is bringing it out of the shadows. And the money is following.
The Lighthouse project is doing some really nice work displaying software development processes across multiple monitors. They’re using Google maps, 3D and other location oriented approaches to create new kinds of developer tools. Now they’re integrating these tools with IBM Jazz. Sweet.
I’ve long viewed screen real estate as a huge constraint to be worked around. The tasks and ideas in my mind just don’t fit on a single screen. It’s rare for me to use just a single screen or even a single computer unless it’s my laptop outside of my office. Most of the time I’m using 2-3 machines and lately more and more that ratchets up to 4-5. Typically one of the machines has a dual display so at any given time I have 3-6 screens visible.
The volume of information flowing through IBM Jazz or any development environment doesn’t fit on a single screen so it’s a huge productivity drain to constantly search for, then minimize and maximize windows. Virtual desktops help, but then windows are out of sight.
Filed under “why we need the paradigm of Rhythmeering” and “hardware is software crystallized” …
Con Ed said some components of the system are examined about every six weeks, but steam mains underground are generally not inspected because doing so often requires digging up the street.That is something that should change immediately, Agrawal said. Robotic probes can detect corrosion or damage to steam pipes from within, without having to dig them up, he said.
Today we have many pressing infrastructure needs some of which have really high stakes:
If we look at today’s global environment we see a relatively high performance system driven by real-time global markets and rapid technological progress. Its performance explains why it is spreading so quickly. However, it is also moderately unstable. In our drive towards higher levels of performance we pursued a path of rampant global interconnectivity that has quickly outpaced our ability to dampen excess. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The result is a system vulnerable to rogue feedback. Even a small amount of it can cause global reverberations. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. Iraq is a great demonstration of our inability to dampen excess in the face of active opposition (notice how our goals have drifted from building an allied democracy to stopping civil war).
The long-term solution is to build more stability into the system. The best approach I can think of is a highly interconnected but fundamentally decentralized system (most of the benefits of interconnectivity but with lots of local control). Unfortunately, we are far from realizing that goal, since our current view of the world is based on old models.
“I think it’s time for us as industry leaders really to get our hands around how we’re going to evolve that model, because like it not, the current models of building hundreds or thousands of customized business applications simply aren’t sustainable,” Worrall said. … At Sun, the company currently runs about 1,200 business applications. There is no reason these cannot be provided as online services, Worrall said. In Sun’s vision, the company will buy services, then run them in a browser on a device such as a laptop or a thin client. There will be no need to maintain legions of servers. … The market is already moving to this more efficient paradigm, but Sun internally expects to be largely services-based by 2015, although it could be a few years earlier or later than that, said Worrall. With Sun itself a purveyor of server hardware, a widespread move to services-based computing by users at large would mean a radical change for Sun’s business model. Its customer base will shift to being service providers, who need to maintain large datacenters. With this paradigm, Sun’s server sales volumes potentially could increase, even if the customer list itself shrinks. As Sun moves to a services paradigm, the company will need to focus on an ecosystem to accommodate this, because it is not the same as having a traditional ISV strategy Sun anticipates move to software services
(the entire podcast)
Don Park, having looked at the IBM Jazz video has mixed feelings I can relate to. He suggests that it’s too cold and disconnected from it’s namesake. Park also raises some signficant questions and concerns:
Where is the life in engineering? What will engineering be like if it’s measured only in metrics and graphs?
… we can feel like less than a person and more like a switch waiting to fire in time. But then maybe there is no room for us in the machinery of global economy.
I’d sum up his thoughts by saying IBM Jazz “ain’t got that swing”. The good news is that by making the association with Jazz, IBM is pointing themselves and the broader market in the right direction.
The answers to Park’s questions about engineering lie in Rhythmeering which shifts the focus from isolated, machine-driven metrics to collaborative people-centered harmonies. The machine metrics are good to the degree they serve human objectives but when people begin to serve the interests of machines, perhaps it’s time to revisit the messages of movies such as The Matrix and The Terminator. Information systems and the human organizations they are intended to support can benefit greatly from jazz paradigm but you can’t really swing unless everybody is participating - not just developers IBM’s Jazz is for. However, in order for that to happen, developers first need to start getting into the collaborative mindset IBM’s Jazz points to. As they do so the programming tools and user interfaces will have to become more flexible and accessible. GVScript will soon show the way for programming and when it can be connected to user interfaces such as those seen in Rhythmeering In Motion and Touching The Meshverse, we’ll see organizations “swingin to the digital times”.
Engineering has been undergoing profound transformations in the last 50 years, going from a discipline which dealt primarily with energy, matter and machines, to one which deals with experiences, knowledge processing and people. These changes in engineering are so fundamental that a new term is required to describe the discipline. Rhythmeering is that term.
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