Eclipse Jazz

For music fans, Eclipse Jazz isn’t a festival of Southern musicians with African American influences timed for the next solar eclipse. Eclipse is a development platform, and a damn good one, but even Eclipse needs to evolve. IBM’s labs began working on Jazz, a way to extend Eclipse into a platform for collaboration.

If you’re wondering what distinguishes a development platform from a collaboration platform (try giving me a Czech equivalent), here’s my definition. A development platform focuses on writing and debugging code. A collaboration platform looks at development as a whole and tries to make the team’s work more effective.

Development has several stages, from analysis and design through prototyping, implementation and testing. Jazz aims to integrate the tools teams use throughout development and collect data from them, so the whole process can be tracked and managed effectively.

Here is an example: A build breaks due to a JUnit test failure. With Jazz you create a bug to track this failure; Jazz links the bug to both the build and the failed test. The bug is assigned to a developer and the developer eventually delivers the fixes to the team. The change set corresponding to the fix is linked to the bug. When the change set is built, another link is established between the build and the change sets. You now have traceability from a failed test to the corresponding source changes and builds. This is achieved without turning team members into bookkeepers. Finally, all these events can be observed using RSS feeds. All the information is available to everyone.

That excerpt comes from Evolving Eclipse to Jazz, an Interview with Erich Gamma, where you’ll find more about the project.

The idea of a single platform for collaborating on, tracking and managing a software project sounds a little worn out to me. I don’t know whether anyone tried it before, but we don’t hear much about it, so I’d guess it wasn’t very successful. Eclipse has the potential to show that collaboration platforms do have a future.

I’m convinced IDEs, the development platforms we know today, will continue in the same form. At the same time, I think it makes sense to develop tools that can cover the whole development process. We’ll see whether Jazz turns out as open to extension as Eclipse.

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