RSDC 2007 & RationalTube
Posted: April 30, 2007 Filed under: George P., Rational, WDSC Leave a comment »A couple days ago I was reading about the upcoming Rational Software Development Conference (RSDC) in Orlando (June 10-14) and I saw something really interesting: The RationalTube (video contest)
Grab a camcorder or webcam and take a minute and half to tell us AND show us: What keeps YOU Rational? Is it the Rational product or solution that’s saving you money, time and sanity…or what is it that keeps you rational outside of work: spending time with family…doing yoga…hitting the links…And while you checking out the videos at http://www.rationaltube.com (including your own), you can rate them and help us choose which “What Keeps Me Rational” videos should be shown at the IBM Rational Software Conference 2007. The video context winner will receive a VIP conference package, as well as top billing during a keynote session, not to mention a video premier at the conference, itself. So get involved! Rational Tube is our community — our people. It’s What Keeps us Rational!
So.. what keeps Grady Booch (IBM Fellow) Rational?
Technologies are so misunderstood
Posted: April 27, 2007 Filed under: Brian Farn, WDSC Leave a comment »About a week ago, while I was at work, an elderly neighbour of mine frantically knocked on our door and asked my wife to call emergency services. Apparently, there was a beeping in her house and she suspected that her carbon monoxide detector was emitting the sound. The fire department promptly arrived and initially had some difficulty locating the source of the aberrant behaviour. It was finally discovered that it was my neighbour’s digital clock on her oven that was at fault. One press of a button was all it took to silence the problem.
Read the rest of this entry »
Heading to COMMON
Posted: April 26, 2007 Filed under: COMMON, Conference, Don Yantzi, IBM, iSeries, WDSC 1 Comment »Over the next few days Nazmin, Claus, George, George (but not the George that writes on this blog :) and I will be heading from the Toronto Lab to Anaheim for COMMON. My last COMMON was Chicago so I’m really looking forward to it (for the past few years I have been speaking at the IBM System i Technology Conference).
We are presenting on pretty much all aspects of WDSC and WDHT along with some of the Rational stuff like change management and EGL. I’ve created a grid of all our WDSC and Rational Sessions using the My Grid tool on the COMMON website. In addition to the sessions that I am presenting, I’m hoping to catch Scott Klement’s session on Web Services from RPG Using HTTP API and one or two of Jon Paris‘ or Susan Gantner’s RPG IV sessions.
I’m also planning to catch up with some WDSC users, business partners and other IBMers. Plus expo, CUDS, etc… so it should be a busy week. I’m planning to do some live blogging from COMMON during the week, so stay tuned.
If you are going to COMMON and want to meet send me an email or just come find me there. I’m generally pretty easy to spot since I’m 6′ 6″ tall and I’ll have my ThinkPad. Feel free to just come up and say hi even if it looks like I’m busy. I’ll be in expo (when it’s running), CUDs (when it’s on), my sessions, Starbucks in the Marriott (during the day), or the Wine bar at the Marriott (during the evening). As a last resort check the pool :)
TUG TEC ’007 – Abe’s Recap
Posted: April 20, 2007 Filed under: Conference, EGL, JSF, System i, TUG, WDSC, Web 2.0 Leave a comment »The TUG TEC ’007 conference is now over and done. Once again, the folks at TUG went all out to ensure both the attendees and the presenters were well taken care of. I had a couple of sessions this year:
- Web 2.0 for System i (mentioned earlier in this blog), and
- EGL and JSF
I have to thank George P. and Kushal, my co-presenters, for their help with those sessions.
Attendance at the sessions were relatively good. And for the first run of the Web 2.0 session, I think the reaction was positive. Although Web 2.0 seemed to be new to most of those who attended, we hope we gave a useful introduction to this popular yet misunderstood topic, along with its impact on both the technology and business worlds. It’s funny how there’s always a puzzled yet intrigued look on people’s faces when we describe Second Life. :)
The EGL and JSF session seemed a little more relevant to the attendees from my impression. Though next time I would delay going into the details of the JSF framework until after showing how simple it is to work with, given the tools available in WDSC. Kushal’s demo on creating a JSF front end to an EGL application was impressive. Sorry we ran short on time for the second demo. Maybe we’ll add a demo video on YouTube later.
We haven’t received feedback from TUG yet, but I’m interested to hear back from the attendees.
Thanks to TUG and those who attended. See you next year.
WDSC Now Part of Rational
Posted: April 20, 2007 Filed under: Don Yantzi, IBM, WDSC, WebSphere Leave a comment »In case the rumor mill hasn’t made it to you yet, or you missed Bob Cancilla’s aritcle, WDSC (and the WDSC development team) are now part of the IBM Rational division.
My own opinion is that this is a good move. It always seemed a bit awkward being part of a runtime division of IBM (WebSphere) as opposed to the tools division (Rational). Especially when we build WDSC on top of existing Rational products.
The Advent of Dualing Mice
Posted: April 20, 2007 Filed under: Brian Farn, IBM, Web 2.0 3 Comments »With the advancements of computing power, storage and memory capacity, we are now able to experience software applications that most of us have never even dreamed of. It isn’t until some remarkable forward thinking people demonstrate new user interface paradigms, such as this impressive one on Multi-touch devices that we begin to realize that our descendants will think that our current graphical user interfaces are antiquated.
Read the rest of this entry »
Business Partners Extending WDSC
Posted: April 20, 2007 Filed under: Don Yantzi, iSeries, RSE, System i, WDSC Leave a comment »It has been a busy week here at the lab with customer activities, the biggest being the Toronto User Groups annual technical education conference (TUG TEC). Tuesday I had the opportunity to walk around the expo area and talk to some of the business partners who have integrated their products with WDSC. This included the usual suspects as well as some new ones I had not come across before.
This is one of the great things about WDSC being based on the Eclipse workbench; it makes integrating products into WDSC quite easy. This includes both System i specific tools and other general tools like the PHP Development Tools available from eclipse.org. Below is the list of System i specific business partners who have, or have started to, integrate their applications with WDSC. Other than watching product demos and working with some of them on their integration, I haven’t actually used all of them so I can’t validate their actual usability or functionality.
There are various levels of integration, some just add actions to the RSE that launch their external tools, others have rewritten their user interfaces so they appear natively in the workbench. I just realized these are all RSE or change management related extensions. I need to find out all the WebFacing ones and report those in a separate blog post.
In alphabetical order….
- Aldon
- Arcad
- Databorough
- Help/Systems (formerly Advanced Systems Concepts)
- Linoma Software
- MKS
- SoftLanding
- Remain
Hopefully I haven’t forgotten anyone. I’m sure there are others and this will be something I plan to find out at COMMON in a few weeks. If you know of any others that are System i specific, or you are a business partner that has one, then please post a comment. Thanks.
IBM puts software engineering students to the test
Posted: April 14, 2007 Filed under: George P., IBM Leave a comment »The winners of the seventh annual McMaster Software Engineering Design Project Competition were announced last week. One of the judges was our own Dave Muir. Dave was also a judge when I went through that course, unfortunately I wasn’t given any preferential treatment.
Quick Thought #1
Posted: April 13, 2007 Filed under: Abe Batthish, Quick Thoughts, Web 2.0 Leave a comment »With Web 2.0 and the advent of wikis, blogs, online games and apps… is it time we reconsider the term Web “Browser”?
IBM ShortCuts
Posted: April 13, 2007 Filed under: IBM, Web 2.0 2 Comments »I just came across a really nice series on ibm.com: IBM ShortCuts Podcasts. Each week industry experts answer technology-related questions submitted by users. Check out this great entry explaining Web 2.0.
