InfoWorld: Tell me about your keynote presentation for tomorrow.
Booch: The fundamental focus of my keynote is about innovation. My focus inside Rational, and now IBM, has always been as
the designated free radical, so I worry about not this quarter or the next quarter or the current release, but I worry about
the next three to five years. And to that end, I help direct where I can [the] things that will enable us to keep the pipeline
in innovation full. In the keynote we'll talk about ways we do that. One is through adaptation, and in particular I'm going
to talk about how we've been adapting things like the Rational Unified Process, to both expand beyond where it has been as
well as to drive it inside IBM. I'll [also] be talking about the several billion dollars of research monies that Rational
spends with IBM Research and some of the particular projects we're funding, such as a thing called Activity Spaces. Our belief
is we can do some cool things in terms of IDEs. This is what we're doing with Eclipse and the like, but as organizations move
toward geographically and temporally dispersed development, there's need for tooling to support collaboration among those
teams, and so we have directed research in that space.
InfoWorld: What is your perspective on Microsoft Whidbey and the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl/Python) stack and where they stand as far as software development for enterprises?
Booch: Let me take those two issues separately and talk about the Microsoft side for once. I certainly respect where Microsoft
is headed here. [But] they don't have a lot of customer examples where you can say that Microsoft dominates the enterprise
from top to bottom. And indeed, if you look at Microsoft's moves, they're increasingly more and more proprietary. The work
they're doing in their Software Factories, for example, does not embrace the open standards of things like the UML, and so
it's another example of Microsoft saying, "We're going to do it our way." Which is fine -- that’s their business strategy
and that's great. But as we spoke about earlier, the fact of having a heterogeneous environment means that IBM's strategy
has been and will continue to be support for open standards so you can have this kind of mix and match.
InfoWorld: Borland is providing Microsoft's UML support.
Booch: Yes, they are. And that’s an interesting thing going on there. If you look at just the marketplace for tooling, because
I thought for the longest time Borland was going to be an independent kind of [vendor]. But clearly they're making closer
connections to Microsoft.
InfoWorld: Why do you think they are doing that?
Booch: I can't speak for Borland, but just looking at it as an outsider, there are clear economic pressures on Borland to
move in this direction. Eclipse fundamentally changed the business market for these guys, because now, how do you make money
off of an IDE? And the answer is, well, it's a commodity and so you don't. And that changed their business equation greatly.
InfoWorld: What do you think of LAMP?
Booch: There's no doubt that that stack is great for certain kinds of domains and IBM will never replace that with WebSphere,
because there's a threshold below [for] which just those open source [offerings] are quite sufficient. The threshold [is in]
terms of performance and complexity. Many organizations that [use] the LAMP stack realize as they grow their architecture
doesn't necessarily grow with them. In fact, it's curious to look at many of the dot-com survivors and just map out the number
of seismic architectural changes they have done. They've gone from just PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripts and MySQL in
the background to [moving to] WebSphere for performance and complexity reasons.
InfoWorld: How do you know when you have to move to something that's larger than LAMP?
Booch: Great question. LAMP's kind of the gateway drug. That’s probably a bad sound bite, but you know what I mean by it.
And you realize you're into problems at the point in time where the resilience to change becomes so difficult. So, and in
other words, you built up something that you're spending so much more time just patching and just sort of appending onto it
to try to make it faster or do whatever you need to do. If it's unable to absorb change rapidly enough to meet the rapid changes
of the marketplace, then you know you're running into problems. And generally it requires that one do somewhat of a seismic
re-architecting.
InfoWorld: How does Eclipse not get included in the LAMP stack?
Booch: I think it's because it's an orthogonal thing; the LAMP stuff is the run time and the Eclipse side of it is currently
the development timepieces of it.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
