Red Hat Updates JBoss Dev Tools, SOA Platform

• By John K. Waters
• 03/25/10

Red Hat showed off the latest incarnation of its JBoss Developer Studio IDE at the annual EclipseCon developer conference, underway this week in Santa Clara, CA, as well as a new version of its JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, and it unveiled the latest version of its JBoss Enterprise Web Platform.

JBoss Developer Studio 3.0 is built on the latest Eclipse platform release (3.5), explained Ashesh Badani, senior director of Red Hat's Middleware Products group, and expands support within that IDE for the breadth of the company's product line, including its enterprise application platform and its SOA, portal and data-services platforms.

"The JBoss developer tools allow us to incorporate the latest Eclipse releases and give full support from a developer perspective across our product line," Badani said in an interview with this site at EclipseCon.

The latest version of the IDE is designed to allow developers to build both rich Web applications and enterprise applications. JBoss Studio 3.0 supports a range of frameworks, including RichFaces, Seam, Spring Struts and GWT.

Red Hat currently claims more than 1.5 million annual downloads of JBoss Tools, a set of Eclipse-based plugins for JBoss technologies, including Seam, Hibernate/JPA, JSF, EJB3, JBossESB, JBossWS, Portal and others. JBoss Tools is a non-commercial project productized in the JBoss Developer Studio IDE.

"There's the mass of developers who use Eclipse and a variety of frameworks," Badani said. "And we want to take a subset of that group for our particular product line, and we'd like to expand it. That's why we're at a show like this."

The company also launched a major update of its SOA software. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.0 adds a number of features to the company's evolving middleware product, which Badani said supports the integration of an array of applications, services, transactions and business processes in one simple architecture.

The 5.0 release comes with new administration consoles, a new tool for transforming XML docs (based on XSLT) and an upgraded UDDI registry. Look also for version 5 of JBoss Rules, which works with JBoss Enterprise BRMS, and better integration with such cloud services as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well as in-house cloud environments.

"This release is about giving enterprises more visibility and control," Badani said. "Both JBoss Enterprise SOA and the Studio tools are advancements and maturations of what we've been doing in the past."

Badani said that an internal Red Hat project, called Andiamo, is taking on the challenge of "making our product line more manageable, and getting more functionality around scalability and robustness and performance across our product line."

The JBoss Enterprise Web Platform 5.0, unveiled at EclipseCon, is designed to provide a lightweight Java platform for such popular programming models as Java EE, Spring, Struts and JBoss Seam.

The Web Platform represents the final component of the company's Open Choice middleware strategy, announced last summer, Badani said. The Web Platform, along with two other Java application server products (the Enterprise Application Platform and the Enterprise Web Server), serve as "cornerstones" of the company's open source middleware portfolio. Together, these app servers provide enterprise-level support for just about all the popular frameworks, including Hibernate, Seam, Google Web Toolkit, RichFaces, the Spring Framework and Apache Struts.

"Since Oracle's acquisition of BEA and Sun, there really remains no independent provider in the middleware business," Badani said. "The JBoss strategy and philosophy of doing innovative technologies hasn't changed. Open choice: Let folks use what they want to use."