The JazzHub team planned to make a big splash at Innovate with our JazzHub Beta 2, the next major release of JazzHub. We just couldn’t wait that long! Instead, we went live with our Beta 2 in time for the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Challenge finals in Warsaw last week.  For those of you who don’t already know, JazzHub, powered by Rational Team Concert, is a free, cloud-hosted software development environment customized for academic research and classroom projects.

Also known as the Battle of the Brains, the ACM ICPC is the most prestigious programming contest in the world. Top teams from universities across the globe competed against each other in the finals, building software systems to solve complex, real-world problems within a grueling five hour deadline.

This was the ideal place for JazzHub Beta 2 to make its debut. Our mission is to help prepare the next generation of software developers for real world development projects. Using Rational Team Concert in the cloud on JazzHub, students learn skills that will help them in their future careers.  So JazzHub developers Adam Archer and Rob Retchless headed to Warsaw to let the best of the best of collegiate programmers kick the tires on the JazzHub Beta 2.

Some students were familiar with the original JazzHub that was released in June 2011.  Since that early Beta, the JazzHub team has worked with over 60 universities and 200 project teams. Based on feedback from our initial JazzHub users, we’ve added lots of improvements and new features in our Beta 2.

Adam and Rob demonstrated the new flow for creating a JazzHub project. It’s easy, fast, and you no longer need a project creation code to get started. Once you create your project, you have a spiffy new task guide available that walks you through important first steps so you can start collaborating with your team right away. Team members who join your project have their own task guide to help them get up and running too.

JazzHub is becoming more social in its sophomore year. The Beta 2 has community features to help you explore JazzHub and follow projects you think are cool.  Users can now “Like” and “Watch” projects, and the most popular projects are featured on the JazzHub homepage.

There’s also a new community feed where you can see activity as it’s happening on JazzHub. And don’t miss the featured articles on the home page to find out how other universities and project teams are using JazzHub for their classroom and research projects.

The real horsepower behind JazzHub is, of course, RTC.  Adam and Rob had some fun demonstrating RTC’s collaborative development features for the ICPC finalists and their coaches using a dueling developers scenario.

They worked on two laptops side by side, both developers checking in code changes, and refreshing pending changes to see what happens. Students got a look at RTC’s killer features for developers like merging, change set history, associating work items with change sets, annotate view, the ability to instantly duplicate a stream, and more.

Contestants and their coaches were very impressed with what JazzHub and Rational Team Concert had to offer. There were lots of oohs and ahhs when key features were demoed, especially project creation, code delivery, and merging. A number of students created their first JazzHub projects on their first night in Warsaw!

Announcing the JazzHub Beta 2 at the ACM ICPC finals was a natural fit, but we still have some tricks up our sleeve for Innovate 2012. We have more community features and improvements to the overall JazzHub experience planned. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with all the latest JazzHub news, and to hear more about Adam and Rob’s adventures at the 2012 ACM ICPC finals in Warsaw.

Denise Cook
JazzHub Team Lead
denisecook@us.ibm.com