IBM Helps Drive Open Source Development

IBM today contributed more than 30 open source projects to SourceForge.net and launched new online skills-building programs to spur innovation, collaboration and development around emerging open source projects.
Additionally, IBM announced it is extending support for developers building Web applications using PHP, a popular open source Web development language. Through a new business partnership and new skill-building resources, IBM will help developers use PHP as part of their Web services and services oriented architectures (SOA).

More than 30 IBM software projects will by hosted by SourceForge.net to give developers broader access to open source technologies. SourceForge.net, part of the OSTG Network, is the world's largest collaborative development site, with more than one million registered users and 96,000 projects. As a result, more developers can collaborate and build upon technologies spanning Java, Linux and wireless, fueling more innovation to drive next-generation software applications.

The projects include IBM's Jikes(TM) software, a fast Java(TM) compiler that helps developers speed their development time, and the Life Science Identifier, which helps developers in healthcare build life sciences applications by automatically scanning networks for biologically significant data.

With today's announcement IBM is also expanding its developerWorks Web site, launching new skills-building resources to help developers more rapidly build solutions based on emerging open source technologies, such as PHP. IBM developerWorks (ibm.com/developerWorks) is IBM's growing online developer community with more than 4.5 million registered users. The site offers tools and education to help developers build and deploy applications across heterogeneous systems.

In conjunction with the partnership announced today between IBM and Zend Technologies, IBM launched a new section on IBM developerWorks devoted to PHP. The new PHP section features technical articles, tutorials and forums to drive further skills and development of PHP, which currently accounts for more than 40 percent of the overall Web programming language market.

IBM and Zend Technologies are working together to develop integrated software based on PHP using IBM's Cloudscape database. In August, IBM offered "Derby," a copy of Cloudscape to the Apache Software Foundation to spur more collaborative innovation for software application development. IBM and Zend Technologies plan to offer their integrated software to developers on IBM developerWorks in the second quarter of 2005.

"The momentum of open source and its adoption by governments and businesses worldwide points to the increasingly critical role of the software developer within business," said Gina Poole, vice president of developer relations, IBM. "Organizations looking for innovative software applications to drive their business projects are looking for developers with the tools and skills of tomorrow - based on open technologies."

Other resources on IBM developerWorks to help open source developers include:

Open source special topic sections for a broad range of emerging open source projects such as Apache Derby, Eclipse, Globus, Linux and PHP, providing access to hundreds of technical articles, tutorials, forums and blogs
Plug-ins, along with technical articles and demonstrations, to help developers streamline their Apache Derby database development leveraging the Eclipse environment, helping developers reap more value out of these growing open source projects
The IBM Linux Software Evaluation Kit, with triple the amount of complimentary trial software available to developers looking to build, run, manage and deploy using IBM software running on Linux. For the first time, IBM Rational software development tools for Linux will be included. IBM Rational tools can help organizations more rapidly build applications on Linux.
IBM has contributed more than 120 collaborative projects to the open source community, helping drive innovation with projects such as Eclipse, Derby and Globus. IBM also recently pledged 500 patents into a "patent commons" to help drive innovation and future software development.

Beginning March 1, IBM will also launch a series of technical briefings to help developers migrate to and develop new applications on Linux. Part of IBM's developerWorks Live! Technical Briefings, the complimentary Linux briefings will run in Bangkok, Chicago, Kuala Lampur, Los Angeles, Manila, San Francisco, Washington DC and more.