IBM to Jazz Up Eclipse

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IBM to Jazz Up Eclipse

IBM is readying an open-source project called Jazz to develop globally distributed collaborative software. Although software development is an inherently collaborative process, this collaboration is usually ad hoc. As software development teams become increasingly geographically distributed, and face greater time and resource constraints, there is a need for software development tools to support structured and unstructured communication and coordination of work. Integrating such tools into the IDE, and enabling them with awareness of the development process and artifacts, can help reduce context switches between tools inside and outside of the IDE, and make for a more seamless connection between development and collaboration. According to Danny Sabbah, General Manager of IBM Rational, the primary goal of the project is to establish standards around distributed software development. The Jazz project, set for a June 2007 launch, aims to extend the Eclipse IDE with collaborative capabilities to support coordination, communication, and awareness among a small close-knit team of developers. This involves creating connections to server infrastructure for messaging, awareness, and source control, building hooks into the Eclipse development environment to supply awareness of the developers' interactions with source code and source control, and integrating user interfaces for communication and awareness within the Eclipse environment to provide unobtrusive access to in-context team information. In the Jazz setup, developers can: Monitor who is on-line coding, through icons that look like a friends’ list on an instant messenger Include macros in their status messages that reflect what files or projects they are currently working on and whether they are coding or debugging Initiate chats from highlighted source code, automatically hyperlink code-specific keywords in their chats to relevant source code, and save the chat transcripts either as code annotations or in a discussion forum It also facilitates communication through screensharing and VoIP telephony with no overhead setups. Jazz also provides resource awareness by decorating files and other resources in the file viewer with colored icons to indicate what other developers are doing with their local copies of the files. According to Sabbah, IBM is building a model to extend Jazz software with add-on products and customised for specific purposes, such as developing code for consumer electronics devices. Sabbah also anticipated a free version of the software as well as more functional, fee-based versions. "In June, IBM will also discuss how Jazz will be layered into IBM's existing Rational development suites." Other features of Jazz are a Web-based user interface built using Ajax and integration with instant messaging. Jazz software is also designed to work with non-Eclipse based software, such as Microsoft's Visual Studio. According to Sabbah, the goal is to use existing Web standards, such as web services security protocols, in the Jazz project. The software could be run in a hosted mode over the Internet or be installed within a company network.