Grady Booch is recognized internationally

Grady Booch, IBM Fellow, is recognized internationally for his innovative work on software architecture and software engineering. He is co-created of the Unified Modeling Language and his vision for collaborative development environments is forming the basis of IBM Rational's strategy for Jazz.

For more details, eWeek published an online slide show listing 25 of the most influential people at IBM. The diversity represented is a tribute to IBM as a globally integrated enterprise with a global talent pool.

Jazz now open to everyone!

Jazzed about the new year? Looking to get your hands on some cool Rational technology?

Well, now you can.

From the press release:

IBM is announcing it is opening up its development platform based on Web 2.0 technologies for developers to collaborate and contribute to software under development at www.Jazz.net. Jazz.net is an open, commercial community designed to help companies globally and transparently collaborate on the development of Jazz-based technology.

Previously only available to IBM customers, academics and partners, Jazz.net is now open to the greater software development community. IBM's vision for community-driven development expands the boundaries of how the open source community can impact global software development by not merely creating a vehicle for feedback after products have been developed, but enabling the global community to be a part of IBM's development process from start to finish.

So, hop on over to Jazz.net and sign up!

Asset Reuse Webcast!

Asset reuse is a key strategy for companies looking to create innovative solutions to solve complex software development problems. Searching for, identifying, updating, using and deploying software assets can be a difficult challenge.

Our new webcast on "Innovate don't duplicate! Asset reuse strategies for success" looks at strategies and tools that can be leveraged for a successful project, including Rational Asset Manager, Rational Software Architect and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.

The webcast is scheduled for tomorrow, January 10th at 11am EST, so sign up while you have the chance. It'll also be available for replay.

Happy New Year!

From all of us here on the Architecture Management Marketing team. 2008 looks to be a great year, and we're all looking forward to bringing you lots of exciting new products, updates and information over the next few months!

XML 2007 pictures

Well, XML 2007 is over for another year, and it was a very successful conference. You can find links to comments, reviews and photos here, including a set on Flickr. Happily, to prove I was there, the set includes one of me.

Just to add to the excitement, I also took a couple of pictures of the IBM booth at the show:

New Software from Rational

Rational today announced new software to help complex systems developers meet specific industry standards and ensure the quality and reliability of complex real-time and embedded applications.

This category of software developers faces monumental challenges - not only getting the job done, but doing so in a manner that doesn't risk lives at the end of the day. Rational is taking the complexity out of the development of complex systems. By simplifying adherence to protocols, standards and code review, systems developers are better able to ensure that the lines of code they are writing are in line with broader project goals - increasing reliability, levels of precision and effectiveness, and higher degrees of error free code.

Amongst the updated offerings are IBM Rational Systems Developer and IBM Rational Software Modeler - and check out the other updates here.

Winter has arrived....

...in a major way. Here's a shot of my driveway this morning.

It's a good thing I work from home.

Rational Application Developer Open Beta!

Want to get your hands on the latest and greatest version of Rational Application Developer before it's released? Now, you can! Yesterday the Open Beta for RAD v7.5 went live, and it's accessible from here.

Among the cool new features in this beta:

• Increasing developer productivity: Achieve greater individual and team productivity with increased support for iterative development for JEE5 applications that takes advantage of the annotation based programming model, with enhanced support for creation, validation, refactoring, and deletion of artifacts.


• Enterprise Information System (EIS) Adapters: Tooling for JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft to improve the developer productivity with these enterprise systems. The Discovery Wizard will support generic, EMD and J2C, including supporting the new metadata import/export framework. The adapters will also have enterprise metadata discovery componentized for consumption by a rich client.


• Delivering New & Emerging Programming models & Applications: Enhanced capabilities to deliver modern applications in emerging programming models using tools that help create EJB 3.0, JPA, Web Services with JAX-WS 2.0/JAX-B 2.0 and reliable secure profile applications. Additional support for the new JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1 and Servlet 2.5 standards is provided.


• Latest Standards support: Includes latest standards, such as JEE5, RSP 1.0, WS-Policy Assertions for Web Services, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing, MTOM, SOAP 1.2, WS-Secure Conversation and SIP (JSR 289).

What are you waiting for? Download now!

XML 2007

I'm on the road again in a couple of weeks - this time at the XML 2007 conference in Boston on December 3rd through 5th at the Marriott Copley Place:

I'll be showing Rational Application Developer's XML tools - for those who are not aware of this, we have some powerful XML tools in our Architecture Management tools, including:

• DTD editor
• XML editor
• XML Schema editor
• XSL editor
• XPath Expression wizard
• XML to XML Mapping editor
• XSL debugging and transformation
• Generating Java beans from an XML schema
• Generating HTML documentation from an XML schema file
• Generating XML schema file from XML, DTD, and relational tables

and, in Rational Software Architect:

• UML to XSD transformations

While I'm on the subject of RAD, the Rational Application Developer Programming Guide has been updated for version 7. It's available as a free PDF download from here.

In it, there's a whole chapter (Chapter 12) on the XML development environment. Check it out, and don't forget to visit me at the XML 2007 conference exhibition.

More IBM Tunes.....

You know, we really should produce an album.


Turns out there's an entire IBM songbook. OK, so it's a little dated (1931), but it has many songs that resonate today, especially the one to our noble engineers:

TO OUR I. B. M. ENGINEERS
Tune: "Mademoiselle from Armentieres"

We're proud of all our Engineers in I. B. M.
No problem is insolvable to these great men.
Their mastery of the technical -- mechanical -- electrical --
Behold in their accomplishments.

Each year they perfect new machines for I. B. M.
Superior products all the time for business men.
We thank and praise our Engineers,
The whole wide world unites in cheers,
To the Engineers of I. B. M.

Odd. I couldn't find any songs for marketers. Must have been an oversight.

From the foreword:

For thirty-one years, the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation and good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind.

Wow! Looks like we were singing company songs long before the Japanese! I can't imagine sitting around today before a meeting and bursting into song - although apparently we'll all be singing the Rational Anthem now. Coming soon - IBM: The Musical!

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving! (there's got to be an IBM song for that somewhere.......)