I was ever so slightly nervous about posting this given the lack of fanfare on any IBM website but Andy has at least saved me from being the first to stick my head above the parapet. As Andy says, one of the items that was creating a buzz at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference that we couldn’t talk about was something named Project Zero. Project Zero aims to provide a simple framework for developing Web 2.0 style applications through the creation of RESTful services, rich user interfaces and mashups. A scripting based approach is used with Groovy for the Java developers but also a subset of PHP. I shan’t go in to lots of technical details, you can read all about those on the Project Zero website.
As exciting as the technology is, there are two features of Project Zero which are perhaps even more interesting. First that, for once, IBM is not trying to engineer an all singing, all dancing product that will do everything that anyone might ever want it to. They have targeted a particular area and are focusing on providing the simplest solution to that problem space. Second, is the Community-Driven Commercial Development process adopted for the project. This project is not open source but aims to provide a more open development process encouraging greater participation from the user community.
Anyway, enough from me. Go download it and try out the examples for yourself. Expect to hear more from me on the subject in future though.