SAN FRANCISCO-Developers are not new to the world of collaboration and other so-called Web 2.0 activities, as generations have long had to “collaborate” to build systems.
The Web 2.0 Expo held here April 22-25 was essentially a social networking love fest, with Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and coiner of the term “Web 2.0,” giving a rarified sermon from his very own Web 2.0 pulpit. Like a preacher, O’Reilly exhorted the Web 2.0 faithful to ride the Web 2.0 wave to change the world.
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In an April 23 talk about “Changing the World, Web 2.0 Style,” O’Reilly told a rapt audience to “think about what really matters. … What are the deep trends driving Web 2.0?” Among those trends, O’Reilly identified: the Internet as the platform, harnessing collective intelligence, data as the “Intel Inside,” software above the level of a single device, software as a service, and cloud computing.
O’Reilly was part preacher, part enabler and part hustler. Not a hustler in any negative sense, but more like a hip-hip or basketball court hustler-he knew he had to give his constituents what they came for. And he did, causing Web 2.0 entrepreneur Max Levchin, who followed O’Reilly on stage, to ask, “How do you follow that?”
But while Web 2.0-ism is catching on like wildfire in consumer circles and trying to push into enterprises for various purposes, what impact, if any, is it having on developers who have long used collaborative technologies to get their work done?
Are developers gung-ho or ho hum about Web 2.0?
It seems the feeling is pretty mixed, with some saying they simply dislike the term, but they like and use the basic tenets and some of the technology.
“You’re correct that developers were already doing the collaboration thing long before consumers,” said Chuck Esterbrook, a Los Angeles-based developer and creator of the open-source Cobra language. “SourceForge is a good example of that. And wikis gained traction with developers before consumers. Even before the Web, there were development servers running source control, FTP, Gopher, etc. Developers will always vary in their opinions, but my impression is that they have been kind of ‘ho hum’ about it as a general thing. When they do get excited, it’s about a specific site they’re building and what they envision it doing down the road. Sure, that incorporates the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ concepts, but it would have anyway even without the label.”
Developer 2.0: Gung-Ho or Ho Hum?
title=Web 2.0 an ‘After the Fact’ Term}
Esterbrook said he views Web 2.0 as “an ‘after the fact’ term, and I’d rather just talk about specific topics like blogs, wikis, data mining, syndication, etc.”
He cited World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee’s comments on the term “Web 2.0,” questioning whether “one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of ‘Web 2.0’ have existed since the early days of the Web,” according to the Wikipedia page defining the term.
Some developers said from their experience, most developers still work on small projects that call for an average of two developers for two or three months. Much of this work still goes on as people passing source files to each other in e-mail or using a simple source code management or work-item tracking system, such as Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe.
Forrester says enterprise Web 2.0 spending will reach $4.6 billion by 2013. Read more here.
In addition, many hosters, such as 1&1 Internet and GoDaddy.com, offer hosted Subversion or CVS repositories for online source code management. There also are several companies trying to make inroads into the hosted source code and project management system business.
Alex Russell, a San Francisco-based developer and co-creator of the Dojo Toolkit, a JavaScript library, said that insofar as new Web tools benefit everyone, developers are also benefiting, but not disproportionately.
“I’m guessing there are a lot more geeks on Twitter than, say, amongst the average population, and you can construe that however you like, but the tools for developer collaboration that are making a big difference are things like git/svk and not Flickr or Twitter per se,” Russell said.
Git is a version control/software configuration management tool created by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Svk is a version control system written in Perl.
“Geeks have always had better distributed collaboration tools because they have been willing to put up with rougher edges,” Russell said. “Collaborative Web sites seem more-to me-to be about bringing those advantages to everyone else.”
Ted Neward, programming guru and founder of Neward and Associates, said there are two different axes to the discussion of developers and Web 2.0: features incorporated into applications that developers are building for their customers, and features that developers use to construct software themselves.
“To the first case, developers get fired up about anything new, and Web 2.0 definitely falls into that category,” Neward said. “Whether that interest/excitement is because it’s shiny and new or because it’s something that users are calling for, however, is an entirely different discussion. Frequently developers will incorporate features into an application because they ‘think’ that users will want them; when those features are displayed to the user community, the response varies from ‘Wow, that’s cool’ to ‘You spent how many weeks on what, again?'”
Developer 2.0: Gung-Ho or Ho Hum?
title=Memories of Peer-to-Peer}
Neward said he is reminded of the major buzz that rose around peer-to-peer technology a few years ago.
“This was supposed to revolutionize applications as we knew them. In the long term, it gave us easier ways to share music and not much else,” Neward said. “Many applications, it turned out, weren’t really in a position to take advantage of peer-to-peer ideas, or else couldn’t quite figure out how to make use of them. As a result, peer-to-peer faded. Social networking, as an application feature, strikes me as being in much the same category-there will be a great deal of buzz around it, there will be many attempts to incorporate it as part of applications, the attempts will run into issues, and the ‘social networking as a feature’ meme will slowly fade. “
In regard to the second axis, an entirely different story emerges, Neward said. “Development is an intrinsically communicative process, and anything that fosters better communication among developers is a good thing. That, however, relegates social networking and Web 2.0 to the same category of interest as tools like IM, e-mail, shared desktops and so on, and may not be quite as exciting to talk about as the traditional build-up around the space. “
Vishwanath Venugopalan, an analyst with The 451 Group, said, “The ‘Enterprise 2.0’ set of products-including social software and collaboration for information workers-supports a working style that is too ad hoc and transient for the sorts of measurable, repeatable software engineering processes that have come to rule the roost in software engineering teams.”
However, Venugopalan said there is certainly a push among development tool and ALM (application lifecycle management) vendors to clean up workflow issues among developers as well as between developers and nondeveloper constituencies-notably testing/QA, compliance and audit.
“Because software development workflows are introducing nontrivial interactions between developers and nondevelopers, they cannot be transacted using source code alone,” he said. “Rich metadata gleaned from sources such as defect tracking systems, version control systems, source code analysis and test runs is percolating into ALM suites to mediate these interactions and serve as a basis for collaboration. These forms of collaboration involving software developers, who are themselves information workers, will most likely contain elements of collaboration and social software already familiar to information workers at large, so even if what we know as Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies may not always be directly applicable to software developers, elements of these technologies will invariably show up in collaborative workflows involving developers.”
Developers Are Getting Into It
Eric Newcomer, chief technology officer at Iona Technologies, said developers are adopting Web 2.0 technology. “I think developers are getting into it, with wikis and community sites,” he said.
“Use of social and collaborative features will further enhance the capabilities of good developers by increasing the richness of the data stream they live in,” said Patrick Kerpan, CTO at Cohesive Flexible Technologies, a Chicago-based maker of cloud computing solutions for developers. “They already are able to do remote and distributed work because they are able to see each other and interact through the source code as communication, change requests and bugs, topic-based chat, wikis, as well as models and test cases. Social mechanisms like identity, presence and trust make this an even more productive process within existing teams and allow even more widely distributed teams to emerge.”
Bob Bickel, co-founder of Ringside Networks, a startup that provides a social application server to enable any Web site to harness the power of social networking, said most developers really like Web 2.0 “for the most part,” because they can get a lot of functionality with very little effort.
Bickel said Web 2.0 has spread the idea of reuse to a much broader audience “because all you need are a few JavaScript tags-and many times a lot of those are automatically generated for you.”
However, Bickel, who also served as a key business strategist at JBoss, said there are two groups that do not like Web 2.0. “The first is the object-oriented trained computer scientist who feels PHP code is not as good as Java or C++ for OO adherence,” he said.
The second group consists of “IT operations people who do not trust other Web sites to be up and running.”
However, from Ringside’s perspective, “we think that the benefit of more people being able to reuse software outweighs the loss of Java’s OO capabilities,” Bickel said. “And we, of course, allow our open-source Ringside Social Application Server to run on-premises and be under the control of the IT operations group, so they love us.”
Bickel’s one-time JBoss colleague, Marc Fleury, retired founder of JBoss, said part of the interest is generational.
“For most of the system heads of the Web 1.0 days, we were more concerned with infrastructure to deliver these Web 2.0 applications than the actual applications themselves,” Fleury said. “We found ‘plumbing’ immensely more titillating than befriending ‘Lola from Chico State who likes beer pong, beer pong and beer pong.’ Call us geeks. That being said, I use Facebook. I don’t get it, am a little bored of it, but I use it, and some of my younger friends exclusively use it for e-mail, for example.”
Developer 2.0: Gung-Ho or Ho Hum?
title=IBM’s Jazz}
Several companies are trying to tap the Web 2.0 craze to benefit developers and to deliver new tools and tool functionality. Among them is IBM, with its collaborative development platform known as Jazz.
Rod Smith, vice president of emerging technologies for IBM’s Software Group, said that from a developer’s perspective, the focus on Web 2.0 and collaboration puts the focus back on what should matter most for a team-sharing their ideas and interacting with customers.
“Today the thought of a stand-alone, desktop IDE [integrated development environment], where a developer toils away heads down to get his piece of code completed, would be completely wrong,” Smith said. “Well, maybe just a little strong, but developers need to find the best code in some cases [and] share it quickly with their collective teams, using wikis in most cases, and with customers through agile or extreme programming techniques. A good example is most Apache projects start with a wiki to invite broad participation.”
He said that is one reason for IBM Rational’s messaging around Jazz. “It’s a developers collaboration platform that is also an excellent IDE,” he said. “When code is checked in, feeds are produced that can be read from a browser or incorporated into a project management dashboard for LOBs [line-of-business users] to monitor critical progress of a software asset. So I think most developers and development teams have already embraced many of the social collaboration techniques in Web 2.0, such as wikis, blogs, etc.”
CollabNet also is pushing Web 2.0 technology in its offerings for developers.
Rob Cheng, director of product marketing at CollabNet, said developers are skeptical of buzzwords such as Web 2.0, “but if we are talking about the actual business of building software, there is a related trend that developers are gung-ho about: the shedding of more formal, abstract, structured development processes in favor of organic, bottom-up, task-specific methodologies.”
Cheng said Web 2.0 advocates like to talk about democratic, grassroots activities where creators and users jointly contribute to and evolve content. The software development analogy is allowing developers and users to collaborate much more frequently, transparently and directly, such as is the case in open-source development, partner co-development and agile development, he said.
And, “in these situations, like with the Web 2.0 concept, value/functionality and demand/requirements flow freely in both directions, making the consumer of software much more of an invested and contributing partner in the production of software,” Cheng said.