Boldly going to IBM Rational 2008

During his presentations at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2008 in Orlando, Florida in June, prominent coding guru and IBM fellow Grady Booch said this year's event had drawn a more interesting and diverse mix of attendees than ever before. This could be described as a bit of an understatement, given that one attendee and guest speaker was a former star-ship captain.

Intergalactic adventurers aside, IBM would normally expect to attract more system-level engineers to this kind of show, according to Booch. But the attendee list showed that a variety of software engineers had shown up, from hard-core programmers to database administrators, and even web developers, he said. The event attracted around 3,500 developers trying to keep up with around 300 sessions and tutorials across technology 14 tracks, according to IBM.

On hand to add some light relief to the proceedings was William Shatner (pictured) whose alter-ego, Star Trek's Captain James T Kirk, knew a thing or two about tech work under pressure, or at least how to delegate it to ship's engineer Scotty. Obviously reading from a script, Shatner told an amused (and bemused) audience: "IBM Rational software is important, a huge number of software projects fail and the role of collaboration has never been more important."

IBM has announced a group of new products at the show for its Eclipse-based team collaboration platform Jazz, which it said will aid integration among geographically distributed software development teams. Principal among the new releases is Rational Team Concert, which IBM said has been built to incorporate social networking and Web 2.0 technologies to help monitor version control and project health.

ZDNet.co.uk caught up with some of the attendees at the show to get their thoughts on the conference and IBM's wider software development strategy. (Some attendees chose not to have their picture taken.)