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IBM is advancing its efforts to improve developer productivity with the launch of the new IBM Developer portal.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Angel Diaz, vice president of Developer Advocacy and Technology at IBM, explains what the new IBM Developer portal is all about. A relaunch of IBM’s Developerworks portal, which provided tools and resources for developers, the new IBM Developer portal goes a few steps further, with continuously tested and updated code, semantically linked content and new resources for developers.
“With IBM Developer and the relaunch of Developerworks, we have brought together code, content and community in a way that drives time to value,” Diaz said.
The underlying technology behind IBM’s Developerworks site has changed somewhat under the new IBM Developer relaunch, though Diaz said IBM still uses its own WebSphere Java server at the core, which helps to enable high throughput.
One thing that is new in IBM Developer is that code snippets that are used in tools and resources are now all indexed and tested by IBM. Diaz said every code sample on the new IBM Developer is placed inside of a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) system.
“We continuously test the code samples,” he said. “So if you’re a developer, you’re going to be guaranteed that the code [sample] works, because if it breaks when an API changes or something else changes, we either fix it or deprecate it.”
IBM Developer Complements Stack Overflow
One of the most widely used resources for developers today is the Stack Overflow community resource, where developers ask questions and can find code resources. Diaz emphasized that IBM Developer is not intended to directly compete with Stack Overflow, but rather to act as a complementary resource.
IBM understands the importance of growing developer communities everywhere, according to Diaz. With Stack Overflow, he said IBM will actually contribute to discussions and help answer developer questions, and will also direct users to additional resources on IBM Developer as appropriate.
Semantic Links
The resources on IBM Developer make use of an emerging web standard for semantic links to help connect different things together in a relevant way. Diaz explained that the semantic links enable a knowledge graph of the content and resources that are on IBM Developer.
“There is an opportunity to accelerate and recommend to people learning, events and code that is much more relevant to who they are and where they are,” he said.
Watch the full video interview with Diaz above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.