News

Red Hat Integrates Help Sites in Free Developer Program

• By David Ramel
• August 5, 2016

Open source champion Red Hat Inc. has integrated two self-support sites -- Stack Overflow and JBoss Developer forums -- with its free developer program, giving coders more choices to seek help with their programming problems.

Through the Red Hat Developer Program, the company provides tools, content and access to its enterprise software offerings with which developers can create, test and demo their projects. More than a dozen of these open source Red Hat products are available, ranging from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and several JBoss-related offerings.

Now, the JBoss Developer forums and the widely used Stack Overflow Q&A site have been integrated with the Developer Program site.

"We recognize that developers may have preferences in the Community Platforms they want to use," Red Hat said in a blog post Wednesday. "Some are accustomed to forums which have been around for many years. Whereas others may prefer using a Q&A site. So we've integrated two Community Platforms with the developers.redhat.com site that you can now use Red Hat Developer Forums and Stack Overflow. This also gives us the ability to aggregate all Red Hat developer content, and soon you'll be able to search across all developer conversations and content to find the information you're looking for."

The new integration means, for example, that developers can post a question to Stack Overflow with a "Red Hat tag" (see list here) and it will get published on the Red Hat site for other Red Hatters to view and respond to or search for more related questions.

"Stack Overflow is by far the most popular Q&A site with software developers today, and has an incredible repository of content due to its heavy use," Red Hat said. "Plus it provides lots of cool features like gamification which allows developers to boost their reputation points. You can also assign bounties to get questions answered more quickly."

Meanwhile, the JBoss Developer forums have been extended to cover more topics while being integrated with the Developer Program site. New topics include:

• Red Hat Software Collections.
• Red Hat Developer Toolset.
• .NET on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Developing on Containers (CDK, docker, Vagrant, microservices).

"Use these forums when you're looking for more of threaded discussion feel on these topics," Red Hat said. "We'll have Red Hat employees moderating and assisting in these forums."

With the new integration, the Red Hat Developers Program site's "Help" section now features the JBoss.org forums and Stack Overflow Q&A as options, along with general "Resources" such as blogs, books, code samples and so on.

"The developers.redhat.com site has always focused on providing developers the right developer resources and content that can get you up and running quickly," the company said. "Red Hat has a very large repository of knowledgebase articles and solutions across all products, which are posted on the Customer Portal. As a program member, you can now also search for developer knowledgebase content on the developers.redhat.com site. With over 2,000 pieces of content, you can quickly find the answers and solutions you need to your development questions."