Blogging Roller

Techies and Modelers, Ted Neward: And on the flip side, we have your average Visual Basic programmer, who probably couldn't even tell you how many bytes one of their objects/classes/whatever consumed, and probably didn't care much, either. Their job was to come in, write a program, and leave, and they did--over and over again (many times, reweriting the same application because "nobody ever thought of that particular feature, it'll be easier to do it over again")

Mike Devlin, General Manager IBM Rational: "How do you help a VB [Visual Basic]-type developer or somebody that's just developing HTML Web pages or who thinks of themselves more as a creative artist?" Devlin asked. "How do you help them contribute in a software project? [...] One of the problems with these VB-type solutions is you can quickly produce a bunch of spaghetti code that's unmaintainable and hard to evolve if you're not careful"

What can be done to help these poor folks? Sounds like Ted and IBM may agree: turn them into modelers.

eWeek published an interesting series of articles today on the ongoing integration of Rational Software Corp. into IBM. Rational Digs Up Gems describes how Rational's Grady Booch is working to identify IBM Research projects to be productized, such as hyperdimensional programming (AOP). Rational's Devlin Eyes Tight IBM Ties discusses bringing Model Driven Architecture to the Visual Basic-type programmers of the world. Rational, IBM Model a New World analyzes the merger's impact on the enterprise software and dev-tools markets.

Check out the Roller-based Foneblogs at DemoTelco.com, a site created by Newbay to demonstrate the potential of their FoneBlog software. Apparently, you can blog by sending and MMS to an email address, sending an SMS to a phone-number, or by logging into the Roller Editor UI.

UPDATE: Doh! Russell has blogged about Newbay a couple of times before and I missed it. See his posts:Wow! I'm in the News and Camera Phone Blogs.