I can see where you are coming from, but I think we are seeing just one
faction of IBM. Let's not forgot who, in the past 5 years, donated the code
to the now most popular IDE to ever exist - Eclipse. That was donating
millions of dollars of labor and intellect. Do they have ulterior motives?
You bet. In the end their existence is to make money and I have no doubt
that is what Projectdream.org has in mind also.
To comment on another one of your statements I think it is also important to
realize the wide variety of markets IBM is trying to get into. Big
enterprises will still continue to eat up J2EE simply because they have the
man power to waste on building large infrastructure applications. Small
enterprises wont be able to touch J2EE because of it's potential
complexities and special tooling it seems to need on a near constant basis.
PHP is cheaper to run than J2EE IMO (for a small shop). IBM is simply
trying to get it's piece of the pie here. Might they be screwing portions
of the open source community in the process, yeah, a little, but I can't
cast a complete judgment yet because I an interested to see how it all pans
out.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Nathan Andelin
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2007 11:25 AM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Anybody checked this out? Projectdream.org
First, from a business perspective, how will companies like Zend feel about
this? On one hand IBM courts them into a partnership, but on the other hand
develops its own runtime engine for PHP applications. How will the Java
community feel about this? On one hand IBM creates an application server
supporting J2EE specifications and related standards, but on the other hand
snubs the J2EE community in favor of architectures and community-building
ideas plagiarized freely from Zend and Ruby on Rails communities. How will
the open-source community feel about this? On one hand IBM enjoys access to
a lot of great code, and may have even reference a lot of it to create this
project, but on the other hand says to themselves that they don't want to
make the same mistake by offering an open-source license to their code. It
seems to me that this project could be the beginning of the end of
partnerships between IBM and members of the open-source community, if not
the beginning of the end of open-source as a business model - it works until
the 500 pound gorilla - the company with all the muscle joins the fray. IBM
clearly wants to involve a lot of people through a community process, but
not transfer their intellectual property.
From a technological perspective, how will IBM's runtime engine for PHP
written in Java compare with Zend's which is written in C - performance
wise?
Actually it appears to me that the runtime engine for PHP is there just to
leverage support from the PHP community while IBM builds support for Groovy
script. And while IBM characterizes Project Zero as a scripting runtime for
Groovy and PHP, the Groovy code is actually compiled into Java classes,
which probably means it's compiled into machine code via JIT at runtime, so
the departure from J2EE appears to be that you deploy script to the server
rather than deploying JAR or WAR files.
The similarities between the structure of a Groovy application and a Ruby on
Rails application is striking. It's like IBM is leveraging the great ideas
of others, while not allowing themselves to be pinned down by any other
intellectual property that they don't own.
Nathan Andelin
----- Original Message ----
From: albartell <albartell@xxxxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2007 6:11:27 AM
Subject: [WEB400] Anybody checked this out? Projectdream.org
http://www.projectzero.org
Sounds interesting for the smaller shops out there. I just read about it in
SD Times (
http://www.sdtimes.com/article/LatestNews-20070715-36.html) - my
new favorite trade rag to read on the... the... while I am relaxing :-)
Aaron Bartell
midrange.com
