Written by Jakub Balhar, Chair of the Zowe Technical Steering Committee and Staff Software Engineer at Broadcom
In 2023, Zowe marked significant milestones in its journey as a pioneering open-source project tailored for the z/OS platform. Here’s an overview of its achievements and future direction.
Impressive Growth Metrics
- VSCode Explorer Usage: Achieved 100,000 unique users and over 600,000 downloads.
- CLI Tool Downloads: Surpassed 250,000.
- Server Side Distribution: Nearly 7,500 downloads.
- Market Adoption: The Arcati Yearly Report, a respected source for z/OS market data, reveals that approximately 70% of z/OS users plan to adopt Zowe, with 40% already utilizing it.
Enhancements and Learning Curve
- Installation and Configuration: While significant improvements were introduced with Version 2, the Zowe Team acknowledges the need for capabilities that would offer an experience familiar to the majority of z/OS Systems Programmers.
- Team Composition and Learning: The Team, comprising both distributed-world experts and z/OS veterans, is actively listening and adapting to community feedback.
- Documentation and Implementation: Emphasis on simplifying installation and configuration documentation has been a primary focus, consistently addressed in each roadmap planning iteration (PI).
Website Revamp and Community Engagement
- New Website Design: zowe.org received a makeover for a better user experience, featuring updates on news, events, and ongoing projects. The projects include collecting Zowe Consumer feedback through the Question of the Month.
- Community Growth: Welcomed two new active squads – the zOS Squad and Intellij Squad, contributing significantly to key projects. The zOS Squad, responsible for ZSS and Launcher, has brought these projects into the limelight. We also invited a new Comprehensive Support Provider (Rocket) into the community of support providers.
- Involvement in z/OS focused Events: Zowe was active in presentation of sessions across the major z/OS events such as Share, OMP Summit on Open Source in Finance, GSE UK and IBM TechXChange
- Quarterly webinars: In an effort to summarize Zowe Community activities as well as insights into new capabilities & components, the Onboarding squad with the help of the remaining squads published four quarterly webinars. There are plans for four more in the coming year.
Looking Ahead to 2024
- Release of Zowe Version 3: This major release confirms Zowe’s maturity, featuring fewer breaking changes compared to the transition to Version 2. To learn more visit vNext
- Explorer for Intellij: An extension for the Intellij Suite of IDEs, reaching Long-Term Support (LTS) status and set to become a core component of Zowe.
- Client Side SDKs Expansion: The addition of Kotlin and Java SDKs, while not yet core, significantly simplifies interactions with z/OSMF APIs. Similarly the growing maturity of the Python SDK, we hope to get it to GA state within the next year. A conformance program for SDKs is in the works to ensure consistency across languages.
Conclusion
2023 has been a year of significant progress and learning for Zowe. With its growing adoption and continuous enhancements, Zowe is poised to play an even more pivotal role in the z/OS ecosystem in 2024 and beyond. If you are interested in more details about the future direction consult our roadmaps.
