IBM to open source some elements of "Jazz"

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: Big Blue is leveraging the strength of its research lab to raise the bar of its developer software tools division - IBM Rational Software.

Rational is currently working on a technology innovation program called "Jazz" which works on increasing efficiency around measurement, seamless integration, collaboration and support processes across the lifecycle of software development.

"We hope to include new technologies that can take our governance platform to the next level," said Martin Nally, CTO, Rational Software.

Jazz hopes to serve up a developer platform that can exploit new technologies for global communication and collaboration. These include Net based channels like instant messenger, RSS feeds, Wiki and blogs.

"We want to offer a environment that can leverage on instantaneous collaboration. The emphasis is on bringing all kinds of data live" he added. Rational Software engineers are working in concert with IBM Research on Jazz. This would raise the bar by bringing together testers, project managers and integrating all kinds of data. The tech preview of this project is expected in Q1 of next year.

"A few pieces of that project would go into version 8 of Rational Software suite," Nally told CyberMedia News on the sidelines of the IBM Rational Software user conference in Bangalore.

The project will also look at leveraging standards based open source and commercial web-era middleware and support plug-in models.

Rational has decided to open source the core elements of this project and invite contributions from the community. Rational executives are terming this exercise as an "open commercial development."

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