Red Hat Integrates Tools Into JBoss Developer StudioRed Hat Integrates Tools Into JBoss Developer Studio

Red Hat has taken a lesson from its commercial competitors and drawn together the different tools that support its JBoss middleware suite and combined them into JBoss Developer Studio.

The JBoss Developer Studio includes the JBoss Application Server, JBoss Hibernate object-to-relational database mapping, and the JBoss Seam application development framework. "You used to have to download them in piece parts. It was hard to get them to play together in one, consistent environment," said Shaun Connolly, VP of JBoss product management.

The studio toolset is designed to work on Eclipse, the open source programmer's workbench. They have been available as beta code for download from the JBoss.org open source project site since August and 50,000 downloads have occurred, Connolly said in an interview. Red Hat this week announced the integrated toolset is available through a $99 subscription per year per developer.

Developer Studio also includes tooling for Ajax development, JBoss jBPM work flow and business process management, Apache Struts application framework, and the open source Spring Framework from SpringSource.

Higher levels of support, such as Developer Studio Professional and Developer Studio Enterprise, are available for $3,500 and $15,000 per year, respectively. Connolly said a team leader might subscribe to one of the higher levels of support and aid members of the team that only have basic support.

"You get all the JBoss bits and developer support and architectural support. The additional support allows them to use the bits properly," such as implementing best practices or use examples of well developed code, he added. Developer Studio also includes a copy of Red Hat Linux for a developer's workstation, since the tools and Linux "go together like peanut butter and jelly," Connolly said. The assembly "takes the guesswork out of assembling a development environment" to build applications to work with JBoss, he added.

The developer's package joins a crowded market. BEA Systems launched BEA Workshop with BEA WebLogic; Sun Microsystems has NetBeans and other tools that work with its middleware; Oracle offers JDeveloper and Oracle Developer Kit for Spring; IBM's WebSphere middleware includes WebSphere Application Developer Studio.