Tuesday, 6 March 2007

Red Hat Expands Developer Tools Business

The open-source software company, Red Hat announced an initiative meant to boost its development tools business and target the programmers. Red Hat said that it has established a partnership with Exadel in which Exadel will open source its Web development tools at JBoss.org, a Red Hat open-source project site.

As part of the arrangement, Red Hat will take over technical direction of those projects and build ties to JBoss open-source server software, said Bryan Che, a product manager at Red Hat.

By expanding in open-source development tools, Red Hat intends to boost its revenue from support and distribution services. The company also hopes to encourage programmers to create applications that run on Red Hat's Linux software and JBoss Java application server, he said.

"What we are really looking to do is roll out an integrated development environment so people interested in building applications can be really productive using Red Hat JBboss technology," Che said.

The three products that Exadel will open source are for writing Web applications using AJAX or other front-end design techniques including Java Server Faces. Exadel employees will continue to work on those products, but Red Hat programmers will now participate, including Gavin King, who founded the popular Hibernate open-source project.