Expand Your Horizons with alphaWorks

For over a decade, alphaWorks has been at the forefront of shaping the global technology landscape, unveiling innovative projects from IBM labs—publishing more than 700 emerging technology prototypes. Today, alaphaWorks has grown to a community that includes thousands of early adopters and innovators worldwide, providing:

• An evolving showcase of emerging technologies
• The latest in technology downloads, demonstrations, articles, and resources
• An interactive environment where end users provide real-time feedback to technology owners

Download the Graphical User Interface (GUI)-Based Administration Tool for IBM Network Authentication Service. This alphaWorks technology eases the task of administrators by allowing them to manage principals and policies on Network Authentication Service-based solutions by using an interactive GUI. The GUI helps administrators get a consolidated view of IBM Network Authentication Service principals and policies. To learn more and to download for use on AIX, Linux, Solaris, and Windows, visit alphaWorks. As always, alphaWorks technologies are free to download and feedback on these emerging technologies is welcome.

Download IBM Unstructured Information Modeler to help the data analyst automatically classify unstructured data sets and providing insight into categorization. This alphaWorks tool further allows the user to modify the automatically-created categorization to incorporate any domain knowledge that the user may have in order to make the categorization more sensible. When the classification is complete, the user can generate reports and create a classification engine for categorizing new problem tickets. As always, alphaWorks technologies are free to download and feedback on these emerging technologies is welcome.

Download Online Stream Deviator, a module that alters the data from incoming streams in order to hide the precise values while preserving statistical properties of the data. This alphaWorks technology can be used by streaming data dissemination applications where the consumers are interested in analyzing trends, finding clusters, and discovering similarities and correlations across multiple streams and where the publisher does not want to reveal the real values of sensitive data. As always, alphaWorks technologies are free to download and feedback on these emerging technologies is welcome.

Download IBM XL Fortran Alpha Edition for Cell Broadband Engine Processor on Linux A high-performance IBM XL Fortran compiler for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor. This alphaWorks technology This compiler is part of a larger family of IBM XL C, C++, and Fortran compilers. As always, alphaWorks technologies are free to download and feedback on these emerging technologies is welcome.

Deep Thunder is a service that provides local, high-resolution weather predictions customized to business applications for weather-sensitive operations one to two days ahead of time. In particular, the goal is to provide weather forecasts precisely and quickly enough to address specific business problems.

WebRB is made for developers of "enterprise" Web applications: multi-page applications, containing non-trivial GUI (graphical user interface) and business logic, whose data reside in relational databases. See how it works.

ADIEU is a radically simplified programming tool for development of Web services and Web applications in minutes and hours instead of days, weeks, and months. This online, Web-accessible programming and hosting system provides a persistent development environment that enables end users to rapidly create and instantly deploy dynamic Web pages and Web services.

A complete Cell BE development environment, including Linux kernel for Cell BE blades, Linux support libraries, tool chains, system simulator, source code for libraries and samples, and a new, fully-integrated installation.

IBM Pattern Modeling and Analysis Tool for Java Garbage Collector (PMAT) parses verbose GC trace, analyzes Java heap usage, and recommends key configurations based on pattern modeling of Java heap usage. Version 1.3 fixes a couple of defects and supports analysis of Java error messages.

The IBM BeepLite Networking Layer for C is an implementation of BEEP (Blocks Exchange Protocol), a generic application protocol kernel for connection-oriented, asynchronous interactions. It supports dynamic, pluggable application protocols for peer-to-peer, client-server, or server-to-server scenarios, allows multiple channels over TCP, and supports arbitrary MIME payloads including XML.

IBM PLACESadmin helps developers to create, modify, and manage indoor, location-based Web applications through a simple-to-use, Internet-based Web interface. The term PLACES stands for Point-of-interest, Locations, and Assets Catalog for Enterprise Services.

Application Designer for Medium Business allows developers with no Java skills to create database-driven Web applications. The intuitive IDE allows you to drag and drop various controls onto your page and add business logic using out-of-the-box actions and JavaScript. Application Designer for Medium Business is a bundle package that includes a pre-release of IBM Lotus Component Designer 6.0, IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS-CE) 1.1 and IBM Cloudscape.

A set of Eclipse plug-ins that integrate the Cell BE tool chain and enable rapid, more user-friendly building of Cell BE applications on Linux. Elements in the design of the cell chip are expected in IBM's future server chips, and could end up inside the PlayStation 3. See the SDK step-by-step instructions on how to create, build, and run POWER processing Unit (PPU) and Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU) managed make projects.

This suite of performance analysis tools for 32-bit Windows systems helps to identify performance problems—and determines how the app interacts with the system and what resources are consumed. Performance Inspector works with standard C/C++ programs as well as Java applications, and it uses the performance counters provided by the processor to measure system events at the "tid" (thread) level.

Class loading delays can be a big headache for developers of real-time Java apps. IBM Real-Time Class Analysis Tool for Java provides you with a means of deploying your Java applications without manually defining the classes that should be preloaded.

This online, scriptable data visualization and analysis tool supports the development and continuous monitoring of real-time systems. It also includes bug fixes related to rendering and the ability to use SWT drawing as a back-up mechanism (as opposed to OpenGL), and support for C++ and recent versions of Linux.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Rod Smith, and Gina Poole have all played important roles in the history of alphaWorks, IBM's early-adopter developer program that is widely regarded for its business model and success rate in nurturing emerging technologies. The three share their thoughts on the impetus for the program, as well as successes and lessons along the way.

As part of its 10th anniversary, IBM's alphaWorks (aW) took a look at how things started and what's yet to come. This podcast is an interview with Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Rod Smith, and Gina Poole, three aW executives, and explains what we can expect to see in terms of new developments and cooperative development integration in the near future.

Although Java™ has become a platform of choice, ensuring real-time predictability has been a problem on this platform. One approach is to use Real-time Garbage collection (RTGC). RTGC retains standard Java programming model—however, it provides latency only in the range of 0.5 milliseconds for applications. Expedited Real-Time Threads is a tool for improving predictability of high-frequency, hard, real-time Java applications.