IBM Linux Event: Further Impressions

Talk about capping an excellent day: upon leaving the IBM Learning Center at around 3 this afternoon, I was greeted with a mostly cloudless sky and a temperature in the mid seventies (in other words, about 30 degrees higher than it’s been in ME since maybe August ;). I hopped in the car (remember, I’m boycotting planes), flipped on WTIC 1080 out of Hartford [1] and heard the Red Sox mount a stirring 5 run comeback in the 9th off the Yankees’ great closer Mariano Rivera, avoiding a sweep in the season opening series. As any Sox fan can tell you, there’s only one kind of good day: one in which the Sox win and the Yankees lose. If both win, it’s an ok day, and we won’t even discuss the other permutations.

But apart from the Sox, the day was notable for the Linux related content (I was, after all, at a Linux conference). Much of what was discussed today was confidential, but in general the sessions were excellent. The highlight of the day, for me, was John Steinbacher’s (Program Manager SWG Emerging Technologies) talk on what’s going on within IBM Emerging Technologies: i.e. the LAMP stack, wikis and IBM’s support for PHP. As I told John in a conversation after his talk, I’m still at a loss as to why more people don’t think the IBM/Zend partnership is a big, big deal but in the meantime IBM’s quietly chugging away with support for what’s probably the most popular scripting language, at least from a web application perspective.

While it’s great that IBM’s recognized that for developers one language/platform rarely fits all needs, however, I also encouraged them to look hard at acknowledging REST as a legitimate approach for their web services stack. To put it in SAT terms, Java is to PHP as SOAP is to REST. It’s not binary, it’s not that REST is the hammer for every nail, but the fact is that like PHP, REST is useful in a quick and dirty sense. Hard core computer scientists might not like quick and dirty, they may in fact look down on such approaches, but there are no style points in application development. As Kottke reminds us, of the qualities good, fast and cheap, you (usually) only get to pick two.

But otherwise, I had a lot of interesting conversations that I wish I could blog but won’t a.) b/c my policy is to blog nothing I don’t have permission to and b.) b/c some of the material, as mentioned, was confidential. At any rate, I’m coming away from the day and a half down here with further evidence (if any was needed) that IBM’s really doubling down on the little operating system that could, and that it’s not an effort limited to a product team here and a product team there. Everyone’s in on the party, though some areas have chipped in more than others. As we roll forward, it’ll be interesting to see which of the myriad IBM Linux efforts garner the most attention. My recommendation? Don’t bet against Linux on the client.

[1] After years and years of driving through New England, I know the Sox affiliate stations pretty well – 1080 reaches almost from ME down to the Tappan Zee. Use 1080 in NY/CT, 850 WEEI in MA/NH and 95.5 FM WJAB once you hit Portland. 890 and 1440 are decent fallbacks depending on location.