Red Hat Updates JBoss Toolset

JBoss Developer Studio-Portfolio Edition 2.0 enables code development in studio and includes all runtime environments necessary for deploying and testing code.

By Charles Babcock
InformationWeek
March 24, 2009 09:14 AM

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) launched Version 2.0 of its JBoss Developer Studio-Portfolio Edition on Monday, which adds several of JBoss middleware products to the Eclipse-based JBoss toolkit. Red Hat made the announcement as EclipseCon user conference convened in Santa Clara, Calif.

Rich Sharples, Red Hat director of application platforms and development tools, said the combination is a way to get core JBoss tools into the hands of more developers with a $99 price tag. The tools enable code development in studio and give developers all the runtime environments they need to experimentally deploy and test drive their code, Sharples explained.

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For example, Red Hat has added the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to Developer Studio 2.0-Portfolio Edition. Application Platform includes the JBoss Application Server, the Hibernate object-relational mapping system, and Seam, the JBoss middleware for building Web applications based on Ajax and JavaServer Faces. The latter is a set of technologies for building user interfaces that run on the server side of client/server computing but offer a presentation to the end user.

These additions make Developer Studio 2.0 more of a full-fledged implementer of Java Enterprise Edition. The 1.1 version of the toolkit didn't prohibit JEE development, but left many integration problems up to the hand-coding of the developer, Sharples said. The 2.0 version "now includes a convention wizard for building standard Java portlets within a Seam application," he said. Portlets are standardized user interface elements that can run on any portal, adding controls and interactions to an existing user interface.

Portfolio Edition also includes Portal Platform for building an enterprise portal; SOA Platform, which provides a framework for building services and composite applications; and Data Services Platform, which provides tools creating data services accessible by JDBC or ODBC and a repository for the service definitions.

Among other things, the update studio tools include improved graphical modeling for building business processes with JBPM, JBoss's Java business process management designer and workflow builder.

With the addition of so many JBoss core components, developers who want to start using advanced elements of Java now have "a rich palette from which to draw," said Sharples.

Developer Studio 2.0 includes better integration between JavaServer Faces and Seam, two key technologies developers use in building Web applications, he said.