NEW YORK – (NYSE:RHT [1]) Red Hat has deepened its footprint among developers with the worldwide beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio, the company's new Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for the Red Hat family of solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For the first time ever, developers now have an integrated Eclipse-based development tools and runtime environment available entirely in open source. The cornerstone of Red Hat's developer program, Developer Studio is designed to maximize developer productivity on Red Hat solutions and ultimately help accelerate the enterprise shift to an Open Source Architecture.

“As enterprise companies increasingly embrace open source to modernize their IT infrastructure, the task often falls on developers to make this happen – be it migrating legacy applications or building new, rich Web 2.0 or service-oriented applications,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management, JBoss, a division of Red Hat. “With Developer Studio, Red Hat is making developers more productive, simplifying the way applications are built, and consequently driving out costs for our customers. Long-term, our developer program is about empowering developers with the best possible tools and best practices to get their job done.”

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 seamless, unified programming model: Developer Studio leverages and provides new tools around JBoss Seam to build applications in a single, consistent manner. Today, the type of application typically dictates the programming model that a developer uses, which means that developers must learn to use many different models. JBoss Seam, currently being standardized as Web Beans in the Java Community Process, offers a simple, unified model for developing any type of application, thus eliminating the need for multiple programming models.
• Powerful Ajax capabilities: Developer Studio provides a powerful and integrated Ajax development environment with JBoss Seam and JBoss Ajax4jsf frameworks, JBoss RichFaces rich Web components, and What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) tools for creating Ajax-enabled Web pages and interfaces.
• Comprehensive Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE) tooling: Developer Studio makes building Java EE applications easy, with capabilities like two-way visual (WYSIWYG) and source editing of JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Facelets pages, dynamic code assist, and a rich component palette. Furthermore, by including and integrating JBoss Application Server, Developer Studio simplifies deploying, running, and debugging Java EE applications.
• An integrated runtime with the developer tools: Developer Studio is the first open source Eclipse-based development environment that brings together the runtime with the tools. This eliminates the need for developers to cobble together different open source frameworks and components before they could start developing. Now, developers have an out-of-the-box IDE for all their development, from enterprise Java to Ajax to Linux development.

The Developer Studio beta is available at www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html [2]. The final release of Developer Studio, which will be licensed under the GNU Public License v2 (GPL), is targeted for later this summer and will be available via Red Hat Subscriptions.

In addition, Red Hat Developer Support customers will have automatic access to Developer Studio as part of their subscriptions [3]. Developer Support is designed to help both corporate developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) jump-start their SOA, enterprise Java, and Linux development projects through production. Subscriptions are available with two different service level agreement (SLA) options, offer unlimited support inquiries, and cover all JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings.

Red Hat also offers a wide range of training courses [4] on JBoss Enterprise Middleware delivered directly through Red Hat or through training partners worldwide. These courses arm developers with the expertise and certifications that help them be more successful in their use of JBoss Enterprise Middleware.