News

Red Hat Bundles Tooling and Runtime in New JBoss IDE

• By John K. Waters
• December 10, 2007

By wrapping all of these components into a single package, the Raleigh, N.C.-based commercial Linux vendor is trying to provide developers with something they don't see every day, said Red Hat product manager Bryan Che.

"If you look at the tooling industry in general, the vendors who base their tools on the open source Eclipse platform keep the really good stuff proprietary and sell it under a licensed model," Che said. "So this is really the first 100 percent Eclipse-based solution that's all open source to provide tooling and the runtime environment. That makes it a unique proposition. The value we have to offer developers is a great experience, free from questions about whether the tooling they've just installed is going to work with the libraries they want to develop with."

JBoss Developer Studio is designed to provide what Red Hat calls "a stable end-to-end, lifecycle environment for application development and deployment" by integrating tools for building rich Web 2.0 and AJAX apps. The solution's IDE is built on Eclipse-based developer tools from Concord, Calif.-based Exadel, which joined with Red Hat in March to form a strategic partnership. Exadel released all of its products as open source, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, and consolidated its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org.

During its beta period, which began last August, the development environment was known as Red Hat Developer Studio. But after an estimated 100,000 downloads of test builds and lots of beta-user feedback, the company decided to go with the JBoss label.

"With Red Hat Developer Studio we introduced a lot of powerful tools around AJAX, around Web 2.0-style features," Che said. "But JBoss really allows us to expand our ability to reach out to enterprise developers who are building new applications on middleware."

But why is Red Hat, best known for its Linux distro and middleware products, releasing a developer tool?

"Red Hat has always been interested in developers, and we've always been a part of the open source developer community," Che said. "That was one of the primary drivers behind the JBoss acquisition. JBoss brought Red Hat a development platform and technologies that developers were targeting to build their applications. The next step in terms of equipping developers and making them productive was JBoss Developer Studio."

More information about JBoss Developer Studio is available here.