News

IBM Launches New Enterprise Open Source and IoT Dev Communities

• By John K. Waters
• August 5, 2015

IBM has launched two new community spaces within its Web-based developerWorks network: one to support developers of open-source enterprise software; one to support Internet of Things (IoT) developers. Both sites will provide resources and networking opportunities for developers working in those specific areas, the company says.

The new developerWorks Recipes space is aimed at devs working on IoT applications for IBM's Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), an implementation of the company's Cloud-Foundry-based Open Cloud Architecture. The space will provide "recipes," which the company defines as "developer-focused, user-contributed, step-by-step tutorials" for linking machines to Bluemix. The community space will allow members to add their own ingredients to those recipes, to edit existing recipes, and to publish their own -- all of which are shared on the site.

Fifty-three recipes were posted on the site recently, ranging from Vikki Paterson's approach to using a Raspberry Pi to connect to IBM's Internet of Things Foundation to Ed Prosser's approach to visualizing both real-time data and historical data sent from registered devices to an IBM IoT Foundation organization.

Launched a week earlier, the new developerWorks Open community space provides resources and opportunities for developers building open-source enterprise software, the company said.

"IBM firmly believes that open source is the foundation of innovative application development in the cloud," Angel Diaz, vice president of IBM's Cloud Technology and Architecture group, said in a statement. "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."

The new Open community space will provide developers with access to a range of IBM technologies and technical expertise, Diaz said. Participants will have access to blogs, videos and tools, all supporting their enterprise software development efforts. The company expects the site to attract developers working in such industries as healthcare, mobile, retail, insurance and banking.

The new community space launched with more than 50 applications ranging from analytics to data management, mobile security to an IBM Watson-based community. Among the site's featured projects is i18n4go, a general-purpose internationalization too for Go language programs. Another one, Agentless System Crawler, is a unified cloud monitoring and analytics framework designed to enable deep visibility into all types of cloud platforms and runtimes with "close to zero effort or pain from the end user." And Cognitive Analyst is an open source group organized to bring together IBM Watson Partners and developers into a single collaborative community.

Those who want to participate in the Open community start by creating a GitHub account, setting up Git on their computers, and then cloning an Open project to that device. More details are available on the "How to Contribute" page.

The resources on IBM's developerWorks, including thousands of how-to articles and tutorials, blog posts, podcasts, wikis, and software downloads and code samples, are free. IBM claims about 4 million visitors per day to the site from 195 countries.