Red Hat Adds SOA to JBoss Dev Tool

Red Hat Software today released the first major update to its Eclipse-based developer toolset, allowing developers to build rich interactive and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications.

The company's JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 Portfolio Edition adds support for enterprise applications, portals and connectivity to data sources via an enterprise service bus (ESB). The tooling, the first version of which was unveiled about 18 months ago, was originally limited to letting developers build Java Enterprise Edition applications with RIA functionality on top of its Seam Framework at the Web tier.

"We've added a whole bunch of new developer pallets," said Rich Sharples, director of product management for developer tools at Red Hat.

The company launched the new suite in conjunction with the EclipseCon 2009 conference taking place in Santa Clara, Calif. this week. The new release adds tooling and runtimes of the JBoss SOA Platform, Enterprise Data Services Platform, Enterprise Portal Platform, Operations Network, OpenJDK and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Previously, we were pretty much limited to building Java Enterprise Edition applications, so traditionally Web-based with middle-tier business object and data access and ORM," Sharples said. "Now we can expand that into business process management with orchestration. We now have support for portlets and support for the ESB, as well, so increasingly people will be able to deploy sophisticated and complete applications."


The software is free and Ret Hat charges a per-developer support fee of $99 per year, Sharples said. The goal is to make its open source environment a more appealing alternative to the SOA-based platforms offered by IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, he added.

"We are catching up in having this single toolset with support for all the different developer artifacts," he said, noting the company lacked a visual, wizard-based alternative to building enterprise-grade SOA applications.

"Prior to this, your choice was to go to various open source projects and assemble this development platform yourself and maintain it yourself," he said. "It's good for the real alpha geeks and people who spend a huge amount of time tinkering with technology, but for the mainstream developer that was never really an option."