The intro/description from IBM’s new Project Zero caught my eye right away: “We’re building an agile development environment leveraging scripting runtimes such as Groovy and PHP, and optimized for producing REST-style services, integration, mash-ups, and rich Web interfaces. This is the community development site for IBM WebSphere sMash, offering users a chance to interact with the development team as we build this new product”.

Generally, I don’t believe in software frameworks that do not emerge off of a successful real-life project and are built “in-theory”, around a vague idea. This attitude of mine is backed by facts: Spring came out of a real project, so did Hibernate, Erlang was heavily used at Siemens… even Drupal was initially built for a college website Dries was putting together. Nothing ever came out of just wanting to create a software framework and thinking you have enough experience (“more than others” is usually the feeling). At least, I know no real good examples.

But besides that, WebSphere and “agile”? :) If you ever had to work with WebSphere, you will understand and will have to forgive my natural sarcasm.

P.S. Nice domain, though. I wonder how much they got that for.