11 Jun 2008 14:06
During his presentations at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2008 in Orlando, Florida in June, prominent coding guru and IBM fellow Grady Booch said this year's event had drawn a more interesting and diverse mix of attendees than ever before. This could be described as a bit of an understatement, given that one attendee and guest speaker was a former star-ship captain.
Intergalactic adventurers aside, IBM would normally expect to attract more system-level engineers to this kind of show, according to Booch. But the attendee list showed that a variety of software engineers had shown up, from hard-core programmers to database administrators, and even web developers, he said. The event attracted around 3,500 developers trying to keep up with around 300 sessions and tutorials across technology 14 tracks, according to IBM.
On hand to add some light relief to the proceedings was William Shatner (pictured) whose alter-ego, Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk, knew a thing or two about tech work under pressure, or at least how to delegate it to ship's engineer Scotty. Obviously reading from a script, Shatner told an amused (and bemused) audience: "IBM Rational software is important, a huge number of software projects fail and the role of collaboration has never been more important."
IBM has announced a group of new products at the show for its Eclipse-based team collaboration platform Jazz, which it said will aid integration among geographically distributed software development teams. Principal among the new releases is Rational Team Concert, which IBM said has been built to incorporate social networking and Web 2.0 technologies to help monitor version control and project health.
ZDNet.co.uk caught up with some of the attendees at the show to get their thoughts on the conference and IBM's wider software development strategy. (Some attendees chose not to have their picture taken.)
"I do think that IBM's Rational Software Development Conference is a great platform for information and thought exchange. This week has been really good in terms of acquiring knowledge from a technical, functional, architectural and operational viewpoint. Understanding of the product offerings from several brands including Rational and its extended services are my value-added takeaways from this conference. In my view, this conference has initiated a new journey of knowledge sharing and learning for new aspiring programmers. I look forward to having similar traction with IBM's suite of products next year."
Hems A, practice head and blogger, Bloomington, Illinois
"The conference itself was great, but the cartoon super-hero theme was a bit overdone. I understand trying to appeal to the geeks in attendance, but there's a fine line between geek and nerd — and that line was crossed. I can handle geeky, but not nerdy. It's one thing to have a theme; it's something else entirely to run that theme into the ground. In the past five years I've attended this conference, this is by far the worst theme. Better beer selection at receptions may have helped with my theme-tolerance levels."
Kim, Des Moines, Iowa
"I attended some change and release management sessions as well as a few application lifecycle management streams and found that what, to me, has always been a fairly straightforward topic, can still be complicated by IBM celebrity speaker spin doctors. I didn't find the case study sessions too hot either to be honest as I just don't have that much interest in what another company has done to implement technology. I think I speak for other programmers when I say that most software engineers view each project as unique, requiring its own special skills sets and challenges. But Florida is great, Disney is great, The Wallflowers played a great gig and I'm sure I'll learn a few things while I'm here."
Marko Maki, support team member, IT services company TietoEnator Oyj, Finland
"It's a very impressive conference, the amount of material that is presented from IBM itself to the customer is impressive. This is the first IBM Rational event I have attended and I do attend a lot of other events in this space, so I think I see that IBM has put some effort into thinking about the technology tracks here this week. One of the really cool things here is the fact that we get to see competitors get together and interact around common toolsets under one roof. It's kind of like the Geneva convention in technology circles, if you know what I mean."
Owen Shribman, support director, Irvine, California
"Aside from the lack of decent 'freebies', the choice of only two beers (at least they had Heineken!) and the rain showers — I guess I'm having a pretty good time. IBM does a reasonable job of getting its message across to those of us that are pretty new to software application development and personally I do buy into the need for greater collaboration tools in programming. It's a shame that some of the sessions come across as sales pitches and unfortunately, I think the show theme is incredibly tacky even though I love cartoons and I'm a keen fan of Star Trek in all its generations — it really is just overkill. It's a big shame that we don't get to meet William Shatner to try and get his autograph though."
Jesper Janssen, support level engineer, Amsterdam, Holland
"This event has been worth the time and effort for me. I have used IBM products for over five years and I think some of what we're seeing with Jazz is kind of in the 'it's about time' category. One thing that bugs me though is that although the sessions are nice and open and you can just walk in, this does mean that sometimes there's nowhere to sit. Also, at the 'Multi-level SOA Modeling with Use Cases for Complex Applications and Systems of Systems' class the instructor opened up by admitting he had thrown every catch-word into the title to generate interest – and then he hardly mentioned SOA at all!"
Teresa Foster, BAE systems, senior software engineer, London
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