IBM developer tools come to Australia

developerWorks Toolbox subscriptions offered a choice of Starter, Professional and Enterprise-level products from last month but the online IBM developerWorks store shipped only to US addresses, according to a US-based spokesperson for IBM.

Marc Goubert, alphaWorks developer resources manager at IBM in the US, said the 12-month developerWorks Toolbox subscription offered WebSphere Studio products at “significant” savings.

“You can get 40 to 50 per cent off the stand-alone product price,” he said.

Australian businesses can subscribe by visiting IBM's developerWorks Toolbox Subscription website and clicking on 'worldwide customers'. Pricing varies by country.

A developerWorks Toolbox subscription includes IBM middleware, WebSphere, WebSphere Studio, DB2, Lotus and Tivoli technologies for development and test purposes. The 12-month subscription gives access to “the most comprehensive” collection of downloads and CDs containing products, tools and information for developers using IBM technologies, the company said.

IBM last month made two other new technologies available for licensing from its alphaWorks website which the company believes may have wide applicability for Australian SMBs.

IBM P3P Policy Editor is a visual tool for creating a website's privacy policy in the P3P language. P3P Policy Editor allows users to automate acceptance or rejection of a website's requests for information based on user preferences set in browsers or client devices.

IBM Common Rules is a framework for building applications, starting from a business model.

Goubert said the new products targeted integrators, ISVs and developers. P3P Policy Editor had so far proved popular with developers, managers and administrators of websites.

“There's a great deal of research that's gone into these products and they have only been available to a subset of our customers. Due to consumer demand, a contract has been negotiated to license these for commercial use,” he said.

Goubert said alphaWorks focuses on providing emerging technologies aimed at early adopters on the website. IBM monitors how many times an application is downloaded and user feedback to determine whether it is proving successful. “We have released 22 new technologies this year so far, including Client Perceived Response Time (CPRT), which compares the particular response times that the individual client is getting from his or her server,” he said. Logging information enabling users to tell how long the server took for each client could be used to boost businesses' productivity and overall IT systems efficiency.