IBM's Booch cites big future for parallel apps development

Grady Booch, now an IBM Fellow, came to IBM through its merger with Rational Software in 2003. Booch is perhaps best known as a co-developer of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Rational Rose. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill interviewed Booch at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference in Las Vegas this week, asking him about application lifecycle management, blogging, Microsoft, and where software development is headed.

InfoWorld: This question has been kind of beaten to death, but are there any issues remaining as far as the IBM/Rational integration? 

Booch: [I've had] somewhat of a hard time ordering business cards, but that's been about the worst thing that's happened to me. I'm having too much fun inside.

InfoWorld: You don't resent being an IBM employee?

Booch: No, it's great. In fact, I love being an IBM employee. I'm an IBM Fellow, which means I'm one of 57 people in the company, and where else can I have a chance to interact with the guy that developed copper on silicon or the guy who's the architect for the PowerPC and Nobel prize winners working on quantum physics?  This is way cool stuff, and the amazing thing that IBM offers, for me, is just being able to tap into this talent of some incredibly brilliant people. One of the projects I'm on deals with what should IBM do when Moore's Law dies. We know it's going to die.

InfoWorld: What do you do then?

Booch: Well, it all becomes software.  We're going to hit the physical limits of what Moore's Law can tell us we can do at the chip level. And what that means is, for the average developer, you're going to be dealing with more massive parallelism than you have in the past.

InfoWorld: Which means your job is going to be harder then, correct?

Booch: Yes.  By definition, software gets harder every year.

InfoWorld: What does a developer do when he has to deal with dual-core sort of development, which he didn't have to do it before? What is Rational going to do to make that transition easier?

Booch: Well, we can't say what we're going to do there, but I can say what's inevitable is that one has to provide some tooling and middleware that makes most of that parallelism transparent to the average developer.

InfoWorld: Would you say application lifecycle management is the latest trend in the industry these days? Why has it become so important?

Booch: I'm not certain I'd characterize it as a latest trend because it's certainly been a trend that I've seen among some of our more successful customers for the past several years. There's [this] notion of treating software itself as a business product in the sense [that] there's something that you have a capital investment in and you have to control its lifecycle. That's a common investment practice we've seen many of our customers use.

InfoWorld: In the press conference that was just held, there was a lot of talk about integrating with other platforms and being heterogeneous. But it seemed like the keynote presentation this morning was focused on WebSphere or Tivoli and IBM products. So what is Rational doing to reach out to non-IBM systems?