IBM’s DeveloperWorks Shines Bright Among Online Resources
November 01, 2001 12:34 PM ET
DeveloperWorks, IBM's Web site for software and e-business application developers, has become one of the best online resources for solution providers building solutions based on open computing standards in the two years since it was launched, solution providers say.
"It's weird, because IBM is known as a proprietary company," said Bob Lytle, CTO at Chicago-based systems integrator Centrifusion. "But the developerWorks and alphaWorks, [developerWorks' sister site for nascent technologies], sites are focused on the open-source community."
 IBM's developerWorks site is divided into six technology zones and seven product domains for IBM products and also offers how-to articles. |
"In the last year, [IBM has] progressively delivered a very usable and useful Web site," Gruhn said. "[It] really started from the back of the pack, and IBM really has taken it in a measured way, fixing problems and coming up with innovations."
IBM's developerWorks is a close second to Microsoft's Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) site as one of "a few best practices" for vendor-developer sites, Gruhn said. However, a case could be made that developerWorks is more helpful than the MSDN site because it offers resources for a wide range of technologies, she said.
"DeveloperWorks is for open-standards technologies. Microsoft [Developer Network] is all about how great Microsoft is," she said.
Gina Poole, vice president of developer marketing and Web communities at IBM, said there are currently about 10 million corporate developers using developerWorks, and IBM expects that number to increase to about 15 million by 2004.
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| Solution providers give Web site high marks for wide range of open-standards solutions as well as alpha technologies. |
Both the technology and product zones contain product downloads to give developers quick and easy access to IBM tools and products, Poole said. For example, the Web Services zone offers a Web services toolkit that contains technologies based on simple object access protocol (SOAP), Web services definition language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI).
AlphaWorks is also part of developerWorks. IBM often offers alpha technologies free on this site to receive feedback from developers, Poole said.
When IBM launched developerWorks in 1999, the goal was to provide a comprehensive resource for open-standards-based development. "Prior to developerWorks, IBM had a lot of different sites, but there were so many and they were not well-coordinated. We wanted to pull them together under open-standards computing," Poole said.
Centrifusion's Lytle said his developers use IBM's site "pretty much every day that we're coding."
Since Centrifusion is a big Java shop, Lytle said he often visits the site for resources about Java coding but its scope is far greater than that. "Basically, any piece of code you're looking for, if you go to developerWorks, you're going to find it," he said.
Kishore Nair, senior consultant at Chicago-based systems integrator Divine, which builds solutions on IBM's WebSphere middleware, said he has used the site to build Java applications and other technologies.
"The site . . . served as a good reference to build a strong and practical understanding on the various aspects of current technologies," he said.
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