IBM Introduces New Open Source Community for Developers
It has been a big summer for developers ready to do a deep dive into open source projects and the Internet of Things (IoT) with IBM’s announcement of two new communities created in its developer-centric hub developerWorks, aimed at giving developers the perfect sandbox to play in.
IBM, a supporter of open source projects for over 20 years, unveiled the developerWorks Open community last month, and packed it full of cutting-edge tools, real-world projects, tutorials and free access to IBM’s cloud offering, Bluemix. IBM released 20 projects in high-growth areas, and plans to release 30 more. Projects span the gamut from Cloud and IoT to Design, and IBM is opening up 10+ of its MobileFirst apps in partnership with Apple that addresses the needs of various industries including banking, retail, insurance and healthcare.
The Bluemix platform-as-a-service offers hundreds of free tools and services already both proprietary and open, including access to Watson, the world’s first A.I. (artificial intelligence) capable of cognitive computing, currently breaking new ground in healthcare. IBM is also working on developing an Academic Initiative for Cloud, where educators and students can access and produce cutting-edge apps utilizing Bluemix for free, which is great news for cash-strapped university engineering departments.
Developers anxious to learn and apply Bluemix to projects can learn how in this just released 19-part free online Bluemix fundamentals tutorial, or take part in an international Bluemix hackathon for disaster recovery called Bluemixathon.
“IBM firmly believes that open source is the foundation of innovative application development in the cloud. With developerWorks Open, we are open sourcing additional IBM innovations that we feel have the potential to grow the community and ecosystem and eventually become established technologies,” said Dr. Angel Diaz, vice president of IBM’s Cloud Technology and Architecture group.
A few open source projects up for grabs include mobile Activity Streams which provides developers with a standard model and JSON-based encoding format for describing how users engage with both the application and with one another. Node-Red provides a simple visual tool makes it easy to wire together real-world events, add in some intelligence, and access simple nodes to integrate them with existing IBM Messaging systems and social platforms such as Twitter, MongoDB, and Redis to create applications that can react to the world around them. And Agentless System Crawler is a unified cloud monitoring and analytics framework that provides deep visibility into most cloud platforms and runtimes without affecting the end user with pain or effort, while providing safety and security backups like data recovery.
IBM continues to surface new resources to support the developers of today and tomorrow by building new communities within developerWorks that drive innovation, science and learning. Democratizing access to the latest cutting-edge open source code and APIs will ensure a future of significant next gen apps.
