Rational Upgrade

My customer decided to finally upgrade to the latest version of Clearcase and ClearQuest. The upgrade was timed to happen between releases of other critical software. The plan is that the system administrators are going to upgrade the servers over the weekend. They are also going to push out a client upgrade program over the weekend.

People are supposed to keep their computers online over the weekend. Then on Monday, they are to launch the client program upgrade install. There is a story out that the last time we upgraded, things did not work too well. It was a while before we were able to access the ClearQuest data. I am doing a couple backups of my ClearQuest data myself just in case. I cannot afford to be offline from ClearQuest for more than a day or two.

Enterprise Generation Language

IBM has announced their Enterprise Generation Language (EGL). This is a new language to help with modernization legacy systems. The big idea is to convert legacy apps to the EGL. Then you can compile the EGL to a modern language and platform. Some applicable legacy environments to convert from in clued green screened terminal apps. The benefit from the conversion is that you can avoid any 3^rd party licensing costs.

A main destination language that EGL targets is COBOL. You can compile EGL into COBOL for the IBM CICS or iSeries hardware platforms. You can also compile the EGL to Java to run on Websphere or Tomcat. Finally you can compile EGL to JavaScript to run in a web browser.

All of this EGL business is a shortcut from manually porting legacy code to a specific target system. A lot of legacy code has already been rewritten in Java. However the EGL case does sound good if you need to target multiple environments. Just convert the legacy code once to the EGL. Then you let the software do the hard work of porting to multiple environments. How do you like that?

The IBM Cloud

IBM recently announced that they are providing a free public cloud for development and test. This will allow developers to quickly work in a virtual machine. Obviously they are doing this to get their cloud to catch on, and generate paying customers later. I like the idea.

In conjunction with their cloud service offering, IBM has released the Rational Software Delivery Services. These are a bunch of tools to do development and test in their cloud. So far I have not done any cloud computing. But IBM seems to be making it very easy to try out.

Now that IBM has led the way with a free offering, I wonder if competitors like Amazon will follow suit. There is nothing better that companies coming out with free services for developers.

Justice Problems

I recently read that the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) has it out for IBM. They have been trying to persuade the U.S. Department of Justice to look into monopolistic behavior at IBM.

Here is the heart of the matter. Previously IBM had licensed their OS to run on other mainframes. However they discontinued this policy back in 2006. Now competitors that sell mainframe clones want to force the company to relent.

Information Week magazine seems to think that this is just good business practices followed by IBM. They are not giving their tools to competitors. What do you think?

Open Configuration Management

Last year IBM created the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration. It is also known as the OSLC. The group has defined their OSLC CM 1.0 specification. In essence it defines how to integrate with a change management system.

The OSLC is not specific to IBM's products. It is an open standard. However you can expect ClearQuest to conform to the standard. Maybe this can help me have some custom program interact and even control Clearcase on my box.

This reminds me of how Microsoft opened up a spec for tools to interact with Integrated Development Environments before. Their Visual Studio followed the standard and allowed developers to write plus ins. This seems like a promising move that will benefit all.

Big Artificial Intelligence

Do you remember IBM's Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov in chess? Well that was the early edition. Now IBM has another computer that is poised to beat humans at a tough game. May I present Watson to you.

Watson will test its understanding by playing Jeopardy against Ken Jennings. Ken is the all time champ in Jeopardy history. Sure any program to do a Google to try to answer Jeopardy questions. However that will not help the computer beat a smart human like Jennings.

The Watson system will use some smarts to process the language from the host. Then it will analyze a database to determine the best answer. Get this. It will respond in a robot voice. I was expecting some weird metal robot from the 70's. However Watson is just a program running on a special IBM computer. To tell the truth, I am not sure I will be cheering for the computer. I like Ken Jennings.

Rational Insight

I just heard that IBM has released the Rational Insight tool. The press on the product says it does a lot of things. However the executive summary is that it assists with managing software development. So I don't think us rank and file developers will be using it.

Rational Insight will give management a bunch of metrics. I assume it plugs into the other Rational Suite of tools to collects its info. I would prefer if it did this without bothering me (a very busy developer).

In studying this new software offering a little more carefully, it seems that it is a set of tools itself. One part of the tool deals with requirements. Another deals with architecture. I hope that my customer agreement under which we license the Rational Suite includes this new tool. I would like to play with it a bit. Or maybe there is a free download somewhere in the IBM web site. I will let you know what else I find.