Red Hat’s JBoss Open Sources Exadel Tools

Linux vendor Red Hat  is a company that is keen on living up to its open source promises.

In March Red Hat acquired several technologies from software vendor Exadel, then pledged to open source them. Now, it’s making good on its word.

Exadel’s RichFaces and Ajax4jsf moved over to Red Hat’s JBoss.org collaborative development site in March and renamed it JBoss RichFaces and JBoss Ajax4jsf.

The two projects are frameworks for building Ajax applications on top of Java Server Faces technologies. The third technology acquired by Red Hat was Exadel Studio Pro, which is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) and is set to be renamed Red Hat Developer Studio.

“Of the three technology contributions from Exadel, only Ajax4jsf was already open sourced,” Bryan Che, product manager for tools, Red Hat told internetnews.com. “That, in addition to RichFaces, were consolidated and released into open source, respectively, at JBoss.org on March 5. That left Exadel Studio Pro, an Eclipse-based IDE that’s been in development for over five years. The code base was much larger than the other two, so we needed to go through and vet everything before it could be made available in open source.”

In addition to the open sourcing of the Exadel tools, Red Hat also announced a new JBoss Tools project which is intended to centralize all tooling for JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

“Our previous Eclipse-based offering, JBoss IDE, has now been subsumed into JBoss Tools,” Che explained. “JBoss IDE included tooling for Hibernate, JBoss jBPM, Drools (business rules), and Application Server. Now, we’ve added the Exadel plug-ins, JBoss RichFaces, JBoss Ajax4jsf, and new tools for JBoss Seam, our unified programming model being standardized as Web Beans in the JCP.”

The timing of the new JBoss Tools project and the Exadel plugins is somewhat auspicious for Red Hat. The Eclipse Foundation is expected to release its next release (called Europa) later this week.

“We’re developing against Europa, so will be ensuring that our plug-ins are updated accordingly,” Che said. “Red Hat Developer Studio will be based on Europa.”

The full Red Hat Developer Studio product is expected to be released this summer.