Red Hat has got out its soldering iron and brought together the tools that were contributed to it by Exadel back in March with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to create a newly branded, Eclipse-based integrated development environment called Red Hat Developer Studio.

The Exadel tools: Studio Pro, RichFaces, and Ajax4jsf, have been combined with the the JBoss tools Seam, Hibernate, and the Application Server runtime. The target is to provide a development environment for enterprise Java, Ajax, and SOA applications.

The new suite provides a seamless, unified programming model based on JBoss Seam to build applications in a single, consistent manner, eliminating the need for different programming models. Seam is currently being standardised as Web Beans in the Java Community Process. Ajax development capabilities come from a combination of Seam and Ajax4jsf frameworks, RichFaces Web components, and WYSIWYG tools.

It is specifically targeted at developers building Java EE applications, with capabilities like two-way visual and source editing of JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Facelets pages. The addition of the JBoss Application Server in Developer Studio also makes the deployment, running, and debugging of Java EE applications a more straightforward task.

Red Hat claims that Developer Studio is the first open source, Eclipse-based development environment to combine the runtime environment with the tools, removing the need to weld together different open source frameworks and components before development work can start.

The new suite is currently available in beta and the final code is scheduled to be available in late summer under the GNU Public Licence v.2 from Red Hat Subscriptions. ®