IBM Ups the Enterprise Ante (Continued)
Directions for Developers
Q: How is IBM doing in attracting developers to the WebSphere platform? Last year, another executive set a target of obtaining 2 million developers.
Swainson: This is not meant to be evasive, but it is extremely hard to measure that. We know that in the last 14 months we had 3.1 million downloads of Eclipse tools (not all of those were unique). We saw Java's overall popularity among enterprise developers continue to grow. We saw the number of people registered on our developerWorks site continue to grow to well over a million. We expect that the acquisition of Rational will increase our appeal to developers in a material way. So we believe that the trends are favorable. I could not tell you in good conscience that I know we've reached that goal. If we haven't reached it, it would become our goal for this year because we know that Java's success—and our success—is tied to the number of developers we have who are using our tools and platforms.
Q: Some people question whether there are that many skilled J2EE programmers out there, arguing that a real barrier to growth is the skill needed to master J2EE.
Swainson: Well, Evans says there are about 10 million professional programmers in the world—and those break into Java, Visual Basic, C, C++, and COBOL as the largest groups. The trends here have been a slight decline in Visual Basic programmers, from maybe a peak of 3 million, a continued uptick in Java programmers to roughly 2 million now, and a continued decline in C, C++, and COBOL programmers. I would argue that for the million or so C++ programmers, in particular, J2EE is not beyond their reach or normal capability. And certainly a lot of the Java people are doing J2EE development.
Now, having said that, how do we make it easier for people to build WebSphere applications? First of all, the tools themselves need to get much better, and they are getting much better. There's been a general trend toward more abstraction of the programming model. If you look inside the current version of the WebSphere Studio tools, you'll find the adoption of the Struts framework and other things, which start to make this process much easier for the average developer.
The second thing that has to happen: That abstraction level needs to go up another level. While it's unusual for me to say something nice about my competition, I do think that BEA and others are on the right track in terms of having tools that allow certain classes of applications to be expressed at a 4GL-like programming level, and you'll see us do some similar things as well. Our Enterprise Developer product [introduced in February] has some high-level tools that make it easier to build applications targeted to J2EE but don't demand that the programmer understand all the artifacts that need to be built or the model that they need to be built to.
We have some cool tools planned for the middle of the year that are designed to appeal to the Visual Basic programmer. These are not designed to replace the heavy-duty tools for someone who is building components for large-scale reuse, and who has to understand how those components are built and how they interact. But there should be fewer of those and more people who are essentially scripting things together using visual programming. We are cognizant of that.
Q: How does the Rational acquisition fit into this?
Swainson: Rational gives us two things. One is an end-to-end lifecycle of application-development tools, of which they are the industry-leading provider. It provides an opportunity to enhance this model-to-code view of development. Rational has a UML-code generator called New Architect. Clearly, one of the things we'll do is make that a UML-to-WebSphere code generator so people can literally come from XDE models and go right into WebSphere. Again, this is part of the high-level development abstraction paradigm.
The other reason we bought Rational is that we believe software engineering needs to become more of an engineering discipline and less of a minor art form, and the discipline piece of this needs more tooling and more methodologies such as Rational Unified Process. Today, those tend to have been applied only in cases where people were building mission-critical stuff, but we think that the general applicability is much broader. So a lot of the synergy has to do with bringing Rational's technology into more of the companies that we have dealings with.
Q: The research indicates that less than 10 percent of development is done starting with a model.
Swainson: Six, I think. The market is unpenetrated. There is one more reason why the acquisition was appealing to us. While it is clearly our intent to continue to support both the Microsoft and J2EE worlds with the Rational tools, the acquisition gives us a set of tools that allows customers to define applications that can be deployment-agnostic. If you think about the on-demand operating environment, one of the things you need to do is live on top of the existing application environments. Rational helps us tremendously in that regard because it lives on top of the specifics of how you touch down on Windows, or how you touch down on WebSphere, and we think that will be important for customers.
Q: I understand that Rational will be its own division in IBM Software, when it seems like it could have become a part of WebSphere.
Swainson: We thought about that. I was the one who did this deal for IBM, but there is a limit to what I can manage. The software-group architecture is part of my organization, and I try to play a coordinating role across all of IBM's software business to make sure we're doing things that are architecturally consistent. WebSphere provides the basic set of services around how transactions get scheduled and how messages get sent, so it is fundamental to our core of business. That means I'm sort of in the middle of everything, so I try to orchestrate and coordinate all of that stuff.
Q: Is that why the other groups are identified by their brand names, but your division is not the WebSphere group, but Application & Integration Middleware?
Swainson: That's correct. Some of that is history, but some of it is also because I do a lot more than WebSphere, and other people do WebSphere things. I don't think it's that useful to tie WebSphere to an organizational construct. I don't own WebSphere. WebSphere is a brand in the marketplace, and the brand has attributes and value and it does things for customers. I build those products and make sure customers are satisfied with them.
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