AjaxWorld – IBM’s Project Zero Gears up for Release

NEW YORK. IBM is in the final developement stages of a new software platform release for delivery of RESTful (DEFINE:REST) services. Currently known as ‘Project Zero’, the effort is officially defined by IBM as, “ an agile development and execution environment which leverages REST and scripting runtimes to speed and simplify development and deployment of dynamic Web applications.”

The details of Project Zero were explained in an AjaxWorld session by Roland Barcia  lead Web 2.0 architect for IBM Software Services for WebSphere. Barcia noted at the end of his presenation that Project Zero would be going GA (generally available) ‘very soon.’

Project Zero is an interesting concept that provides a stripped down Java environment for delivery of SOA, RIA and mashups in a web environment. It’s not just about Java though as it also support PHP as a scripting runtime though IBM does not support the full PHP lanuage as is currently available via PHP.net, but rather just a subset. To my simplistic ears it sounded like IBM essentially has its own ‘flavor’ of PHP. Barcia explained that Project Zero’s PHP runtime is codenamed P9 and it’s built on top of IBM’ J9 JVM.

The whole effort is supposed to be easy to create for and deploy with an integrated app server. As well there is an Eclipse IDE and a web based IDE for development. In fact the web based IDE also included some Ajax Dojo widgets and looked to me like it could be the basis of a new super web based Ajax IDE.

Project Zero is being developed by IBM as an ‘open’ project which should not be confused with open source. Barcia explained that the project is being developed in the open at ProjectZero.org and is available under a commercial license.

As to whether or not Project Zero will ever become open source Barcia simply shrugged and said: “We’ll see where the community takes us.”