Red Hat unveils Developer Studio beta

Red Hat has announced the beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio, the new Eclipse-based IDE for the Red Hat family of solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The cornerstone of Red Hat's developer program, Developer Studio, combines products contributed to Red Hat by Exadel in March 2007—Exadel Studio Pro, RichFaces, and Ajax4jsf—with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Seam, Hibernate and the JBoss Application Server runtime, into a powerful development environment for enterprise Java, Ajax, and SOA applications. Developer Studio features a unified programming model, JBoss Seam (which is currently being standardized as Web Beans in the Java Community Process) that offers a simple, unified model for developing any type of application; an integrated Ajax development environment with JBoss Seam and JBoss Ajax4jsf frameworks, JBoss RichFaces rich Web components, and WYSIWYG tools for creating Ajax-enabled Web pages and interfaces; comprehensive Java Platform, Enterprise Edition tooling; and an integrated runtime with the developer tools.

The Developer Studio beta is available from the Red Hat Web site. The final release of Developer Studio, which will be available under the GPL v2 license, is targeted for release later this summer and will be available via Red Hat Subscriptions. Red Hat Developer Support customers will have automatic access to Developer Studio as part of their subscriptions.

Although this announcement is for the beta, not final product, we see the importance of this offering to be considerable. While many may think of open source developers stereotypically as command line-driven geeks giggling together in darkened rooms without windows, the reality is that developers, especially in corporate environments, do not have the luxury of aspiring to their inner geekdom but do face a reality that there is never enough time to do everything that needs to be done. Hence, the importance of developer tools for any environment, open source or not.

Eclipse as a framework has been around for a while, and there are many developers taking advantage of it. However, in general, developers have had to weave together their test and development environments from multiple frameworks, components, and test environments. With this announcement, the potential to have a comprehensive IDE that could support all development tasks, be they Java, Ajax or Linux, is becoming a reality. It is clear that Developer Studio seeks to steer corporate developer activity towards Open Source Architectures in general, and Red Hat solutions specifically; however, we do not see this solely as a self-serving Red Hat venture. Corporate developers can now have an integrated Eclipse-based development and runtime environment that is entirely open source and available from a single supplier.

Considering that JBoss Seam allows developers to build applications in a consistent manner from a simple operational perspective, the potential to simplify, streamline and reduce the cost of the developer's toolkit is considerable. As such, we expect there will be considerable interest in kicking the tires of this offering, and if it works as well as it is advertised, this solution may find itself the darling of many corporate developers.

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