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Total downloads: Several hundred thousand in the past few years
Posted on alphaWorks: December 10, 1999
Graduated from alphaWorks: November 5, 2007. NotesBuddy was the most-downloaded technology from alphaWorks every month for over five years, with several hundred thousand downloads in the past few years. Over 20 innovations from NotesBuddy have been incorporated into Lotus Sametime Connect 7.5.1. NotesBuddy was a unified notification and messaging tool for e-mail (Lotus Notes and POP3), instant messaging (Sametime), directory information, and buddy status. This tool was made available by the IBM Ease of Use team. Users were both inside and outside IBM. Over 110,000 IBM employees (30%) used NotesBuddy every day, and the IBM CIO's office recognized NotesBuddy as an "alternative" Sametime program in employee surveys and infrastructure planning. As graded by the user community, NotesBuddy was among the highest-ranked technologies on alphaWorks, with a score of 4.45 out of 5.0. Overall satisfaction was consistently high at 84%. NotesBuddy had the highest amount of feedback from the community, with 2824 evaluation surveys completed in one year alone. Several articles about NotesBuddy appeared in the press. NotesBuddy has had tremendous product influence: Major features in Sametime 7.5 had their roots in NotesBuddy and got into 7.5 either directly from NotesBuddy or indirectly via feature adoption by other IBM clients such as ICT. In 2003, Craig Swearingen, the lead programmer for NotesBuddy, received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (OTAA) for his work on NotesBuddy. According to Mr. Swearingen, "It's a research project to find out what people like and will use." Alan Tannenbaum, concept and user experience leader for NotesBuddy, received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award (OIA) for the concepts and design of the NotesBuddy interface. Mr. Tannenbaum adds that "NotesBuddy is a platform for experimenting with new and innovative messaging features without users having the high expectations that come with using the mainstream products. We add about five to eight new features in each release, based on user feedback. The NotesBuddy discussion forum on alphaWorks is very active. Now that we have migrated the majority of the popular NotesBuddy features into the Sametime 7.5.1 commercial product, we are confident that the high customer appeal will be experienced by the full Sametime community. Customer feedback has been great so far, and Craig and I feel very satisifed that our contributions are so well-received." ABLE
Total downloads: Over 25,000 downloads in first 4 years
Posted on alphaWorks: May 2000 Agent Building and Learning Environment (ABLE) is a JavaTM framework, component library, and productivity toolkit for building intelligent agents using machine learning and reasoning. The ABLE research project is made available by the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. ABLE is shipped with WebSphere® Portal 5.0 and IBM Workplace Services Express 2.0, which uses ABLE rules as part of the installation process; and with iSeries® i5/OS®, which uses ABLE inferencing for trace analysis of communications failure and includes an ABLE-based agent management console. In addition, ABLE was named by Autonomic Computing as a core technology for data analysis. ABLE has been used in ETTK, Ontology Management System, Ontology-based Web Services for Business Integration, and several Extreme Blue projects. According to project lead Joseph Bigus, “alphaWorks has been an extremely effective channel for us to demonstrate IBM's agent and rules technology leadership: We have a large number of downloads from universities and industrial research labs. We use the alphaWorks forums and our ableinfo e-mail ID to provide technical support. The alphaWorks download reports allow us to track our user base. While ABLE technology “graduated” several years ago, we continue to use alphaWorks to distribute research drivers and gain early feedback on our latest functional enhancements.” IBM Business Process Execution Language for Web Services Java Run Time (BPWS4J)
Posted on alphaWorks: August 9, 2002 The IBM Business Process Execution Language for Web Services JavaTM Run Time (BPWS4J) includes the following: a platform upon which can be executed business processes written using the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS); a set of samples demonstrating the use of BPEL4WS; a tool that validates BPEL4WS documents; and an Eclipse-based editor for BPEL4WS processes. BPWS4J was released on the day that the BPEL4WS specification was made public, and for a while after was the only realization of the specification available to those who wanted to experiment with the language. BPWS4J is currently being used as the representative IBM implementation in the Implementation and Interoperability subgroup of the OASIS Technical Committee that is standardizing BPEL4WS. Since the creation of BPWS4J, IBM has released production-level support for BPEL4WS in the form of the WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation (WBI SF) Process Choreographer. IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4
Posted on alphaWorks: May 1, 2003 The IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4 consists of a set of JavaTM classes and APIs with five sample applications: three cross-platform playback applications and two tools for generating MPEG-4 content for use with MPEG-4-compliant devices. This toolkit has also been one of the top downloads on alphaWorks, and components of the toolkit have now become part of the following products: IBM VideoCharger, Sametime® for e-meetings, Lotus® Workplace, and IBM LinuxTM client for e-business (for playing MPEG4 content). Structural Analysis for Java
Posted on alphaWorks: March 1, 2004 Structural Analysis for JavaTM (SA4J) analyzes structural dependencies of Java applications, measures stability, detects structural "anti-patterns," and more. This technology was downloaded about 5000 times in the first month after posting and and extensively covered by industry press. In December 2004, it became part of IBM RationalTM Software Architect (RSA). Portions of the SA4J functionality are integrated with the UML 2 modeling and code visualization capabilities of IBM RSA. Two elements of SA4J have been incorporated into products: Anti-pattern detection was integrated into RSA Structural Analysis Code Review; and dependency visualizations were integrated into RSA diagram browsing capability. Additionally, two new features have been developed using the SA4J technology: RSA architectural control rules and design pattern mining; the latter can be found as part of the Architecture Discovery feature in the RSA Diagram Navigator. According to Goran Begic, “The technology is very important because it helps with reducing the maintenance costs of software development (approximately 70% to 80% of overall software applications costs). alphaWorks raised the awareness and the importance of structural analysis through the technology preview program.” Robocode
Robocode, one of the top downloads at alphaWorks, is now open-source. Robocode is a fun programming game that teaches Java by letting you create Java "Robots," real Java objects that battle it out onscreen against other robots. Because Robocode makes it fun, easy, and even exciting to learn to program in Java, it is useful in schools. IBM Software Group in Brazil sponsored a contest (June-October 2004) among universities in the State of Santa Catarina called JavaCombate. This contest used Robocode, which was evaluated by the professors as the best tool for learning Java. They intend to make it a national contest. Mathew Nelson, the creator of Robocode, says, “Robocode started as a late-night at-home project to write the game I wanted to play. Later I brought it to IBM, where we released on alphaWorks and experienced tremendous, unexpected popularity.” He also states, "alphaWorks helped me immensely in obtaining the approvals necessary to release Robocode as open source." For further information about Robocode, please visit the following Web sites:
Robocode at SourceForge.net
Robowiki.net
Robocode.net
Easy Mining Procedures
Posted on alphaWorks: September 25, 2003 Easy Mining Procedures for DB2® Intelligent Miner provide an easy-to-use SQL interface for the main steps of the data-mining process. They are implemented as JavaTM-stored procedures of DB2, where they exploit the functionality of Intelligent Miner Modeling and Scoring. In general, one call to an Easy Mining procedure corresponds to the execution of several SQL statements with the functions and methods of Intelligent Miner Modeling and Scoring. Easy Mining Procedures are now an integrated part of IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner 8.2. Cornelius Dufft says, "We felt the need to ease the way for developers to integrate data mining into applications. One main obstacle was the high data-mining skill, which was needed to sucessfully do data mining. Therefore, we developed the Easy Mining Procedures. We first made them available via alphaWorks and now feel affirmed to have them become a regular part of our newly available product IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner 8.2.” According to Toni Bollinger, "Putting the Easy Mining Procedures at alphaWorks made it very easy to distribute them to partners or customers. When a partner or a customer (or an IBMer) was interested in the Easy Mining Procedures, I only needed to send them the link to alphaWorks. After that I got the direct feedback from them." alphaWorks wins Jolt Award in 2003
alphaWorks received the 2003 Jolt Award in the category of “Web Sites and Developer Networks.” The Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards are announced by the editors of Software Development magazine. According to Perforce.com, “For the past 13 years, Software Development Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards have been presented annually to products, books and websites that have "jolted" the industry with their impact on creating faster, easier and more efficient software. Jolt cola, the fabled soft drink used by software developers for sustenance during development projects, sponsors the awards presentation.” -- “CMP Media's Software Development Magazine Announces Winners for the 13th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards,” 3/27/03
