IBM today formally opened Jazz open development community for the development of new collaboration technologies. Now www.jazz.net is open to all developers as the open, transparent environment for building Eclipse-based projects. One aim of jazz to give customers a view into the creation process of applications.
However I feel jazz has to face tough competition with CollabNet’s SourceForge and Subversion which are another two of the most prominent open development communities.
On Jazz anyone can come and see the developers developing Jazz products in real time, provide feedback. The first project to come from Jazz.net will be IBM Rational Team Concert Express, currently in beta 2. The aim of this project is to help small and mid-sized development teams improve their productivity by using more collaborative technologies to keep in touch. The product uses IBM WebSphere and IBM Lotus Sametime, Apache Tomcat, Apache Derby and Jabber. It is built on IBM’s Eclipse technology, it’s for Eclipse-based application development. However, it also will support scripting languages like Perl and Python.
In this Rational Team Concert Express there are features, like a Web 2.0 interface and instant messaging as part of its design but all are very reliant on other IBM technologies. It also includes Web dashboards to help monitor the progress of the project. Managers can set benchmarks and other metrics, while the monitors keep track of how far along the project is and how well it conforms to plans.
