IBM improves on autonomic toolkit

29.10.2004
Von Ed Scannell

IBM Corp. on Friday gave its autonomic computing strategy is boost unwrapping an enhanced version of a toolkit designed to help developers more quickly integrate a number of self-managing functions into their existing applications and services.

The new Autonomic Computing Toolkit 2.0 now contains embeddable components, usage scenarios, and more detailed documentation. The new offering can work in concert with IBM"s Software Development Platform, a collection of tools to help programmers integrate and extend applications for on demand corporate environments.

Some developers said they believe the new toolkit could help them carry out more thorough analysis that will help in solving problems.

"IBM"s Autonomic Management Engine (AME) enabled us to add deeper root-cause analysis to solve problems our current customers are having. The steps IBM has taken to create these resources help companies like ours get to market faster," said Chris Noble, CEO of Singlestep Technologies Group in San Francisco.

The ease-of-use qualities of the AME have been improved and it now features broadened application support. The AME is responsible for monitoring and analyzing events, and then planning the execution of corrective actions on a given computing resource. A new Eclipse plug in, called the Resource Model Builder, has been included that better allows programmers to customize the AME to handle events inside their products, a company spokesman said.

Version 2.0 features support for the recently announced Eclipse 3.0 platform as well as tooling support on both Windows and Linux platforms. The product also supports run-time technologies on IBM"s OS/400 operating system and Sun Microsystems Inc."s Solaris operating system.

Interested corporate and third-party developers can download the toolkit at www.ibm.com/developerWorks/autonomic.