Red Hat and Exadel have announced a partnership that will bring Eclipse-based developer tools to Red Hat’s JBoss middleware.
The tools, which will be geared towards developing service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0 applications, will be made available as open source under the JBoss.org community, which works on open-source projects that are then rolled into JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
Red Hat will work with Exadel to drive development of the projects and their integration with JBoss IDE and other JBoss technologies, including JBoss Seam and Hibernate.
“We want to attract developers to build new applications on top of our platform and not just simply migrate existing applications ... to our platforms,” says Bryan Che, Red Hat’s product manager.
As part of the agreement, Exadel will make available through open source all its products, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, and consolidate its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org.
Studio Pro is a web development environment that allows developers to work with multiple frameworks in a single environment. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are models for building rich internet and Web 2.0 applications, Che says.
RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are now available on JBoss.org under the LGPL licence. This licence requires that when people make changes to the code, they send those changes back to JBoss and the community.
Red Hat plans to rebrand Studio Pro as Red Hat Developer Studio and make it available this year under a GPL-based licence.
Unlike other vendors, such as IBM and Borland, which have built programming tools on top of the open-source Eclipse IDE and are focused on the proprietary customisation of the tools, Red Hat plans to provide open-source access to all its tools, Che says.
“This the first time a tool set of this calibre is going to be appearing in open source,” he says.
“We want to make sure even though these are Red Hat value-adds that we protect them and make sure they remain in open source.”