Development

The ProjectZero Catalog – why write it, when you can re-use it?

I joke with my colleagues that the last piece of unique code was written in 1982 – Which, if I remember correctly, was the year after I started programming. I say this because at some level what’s old is new and what’s new is old – if you know what I mean. Applying the law of large numbers, along with the wealth of information available on the net, one might assert that any code you need to write is a simple, Google, Cut and Paste away from being written. Heck, why re-invent the wheel.

Project Zero is trying to make the Search, Cut and Paste style of programming more of a prominent thought. I’ve have been saying that Zero is all about Agility – and the most expeditious code written is the code that you didn’t write in the first place!

Enter the CatalogZero, which is a Zero application under development that embodies these properties and has recently made its appearance on the ProjectZero web site.

The purpose of the CatalogZero is allowing you to search and discover Zero assets. In a sense, the Catalog liberates content in an Ivy repository and makes it available to the Web – allowing it to be indexed, discovered, commented on and rated.

The contents of the CatalogZero includes applications, widgets and services as well as the components that make up the Zero environment (e.g., Zero Core, Zero Data, the PHP Extensions, etc.) Technically speaking, the Zero catalog is Zero specific web-app that front ends an Ivy repository, allowing the content to be viewed on the web, sorted, searched, and annotated with comments and ratings.

As I said, we are just getting started with the Zero catalog. We hope to incrementally graduate the Catalog to a place of prominence within the Zero world.

The Project Zero team has kicked this off by publishing its core assets to the Catalog. This includes components that make up the Zero environment, plus sample applications and the widgets and REST services that are the building blocks of these apps.

Next we hope to open the catalog up to Project Zero community at large. This will allow members of the community to share code that they have written with the rest of the community.

We have future thoughts of using the Catalog to offer “premium content” that is for fee. I can also image building a marketplace of sorts around the Catalog, were we allow community members to sell Zero related assets.

In previous blog postings, I’ve talked about Zero in the light of our SOA strategy. Re-use is a huge part of SOA. The Zero catalog facilitates re-use. Why write it, when you can re-use it!

- Jerry