Project Zero

Project Zero is a project in IBM that I've been working with over the past year.

Project Zero is an incubator project started within IBM that is focused on the agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications. Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and executing applications based on popular Web technologies. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

Personally I think there are three important aspects to Project Zero:

REST

Support for REST is a first class citizen in Zero. Check out Resource (REST) handling in the Developer's Guide.

Scripting Languages

Groovy and PHP are first class citizens in Zero. Now we're not talking about languages off the JVM, the version of PHP is something that compiles down into Java, but the support of languages that are not Java is significant.

Open Development

This isn't a finished product, as a matter of fact there is a significant amount of work to be done, but that work will be done in the open, right down to having a public bugzilla database.