In 2007, we launched JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 our first Eclipse-based integrated development environment. This was a significant product announcement for many reasons; it marked Red Hat’s first entry into development tooling, it combined tooling with runtime and most importantly JBDS 1.0 rounded out our JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio to cover all phases of the application lifecycle. At the time we received positive feedback from our customers and analysts alike on how JBoss Developer Studio enhanced our already strong position as a solution of choice for developers wanting an easy-to-use powerful application development tool at a low cost entry point.

One of our main goals with the first release was to create a comprehensive development tool that would be part of a larger tested and certified stack combining IDE with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, this allowed for a cohesive and compatible way to get developers contributing and developing on JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Ultimately, JBDS 1.0 increased the value of Red Hat’s entire solutions portfolio.

Today you’ll hear more about the next release of JBDS at the JBoss Virtual Experience, both in the BoF sessions, and from Rob Cardwell, vice president, Middleware Technology. Currently the Candidate Release 2 (CRS) is out and general availability of JBDS 2.0 will be coming in mid-March. Its an exciting event for us as the next iteration of this technology has already created a stir within the JBoss.org community with over 1 million downloads of JBoss Tools, the community project that fuels much of the JBoss Developer Studio product offering. And as our customers and development community continues to demand innovative functionality we’ve made that a top priority for our second release. Users can now see newly added tools and support for SOA and Portal platforms. At the same time JBDS 2.0 comes integrated with platform binaries for faster development and testing of applications. The new release also includes improved tooling that supports the latest version of Enterprise Application Platform along with the most popular Seam 2.1 framework. All of this means that Red Hat is continuing to put our customers first, carve costs out of application development and production deployment and enable customers to continue to innovate for a competitive edge in the marketplace.

JBoss Seam is an application framework that is used by our customers to build next-generation Web 2.0 applications and is designed to eliminate complexity. JBoss Seam, along with JBoss Hibernate, is one of the many fully integrated and supported components in our JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Recently, JBoss Seam was recognized by The Great Indian Developer Awards as a finalist in the “Frameworks – Libraries, Components and Frameworks” category. The Awards, which include 15 varied categories, will announce the winners during the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 in Bangalore, India, taking place May 19-23.

Not too long ago, JBoss Seam was also recognized by the InfoWorld Bossie Awards for the value delivered by the technology’s new functionality.

Make sure you vote for Seam before voting for The Great Indian Developer winners closes in May. And check out the latest innovations in the Seam community.

It’s no secret that Red Hat is a leading contributor to the development of open source software. In fact, as noted by a couple of recent surveys, Red Hat is the leading corporate contributor to the most important open source project of all, the Linux Kernel.

Last week, the Linux Foundation published a report about Linux kernel development and we were recognized as the leading corporate contributor with over 9,000 changes contributed, or 11.2 percent of the total. And we were also recognized a few months ago by Linux Weekly News as the most active company contributor both by changesets (12 percent) and by lines changed (12.7 percent) in the development of the 2.6.23 kernel. The results for these two reports are summarized in the following table:

The two surveys show slightly different rankings, which are a result of differences in counting methods. Nevertheless, Red Hat emerges as the top contributor in each.

The top 10 companies listed as contributors in the Linux Foundation report have made an impressive 75 percent of the improvements to the kernel. Of course, not everyone who benefits from the capabilities of the Linux kernel is a contributor, but the many corporate, government, academic and individual contributors do so because they see value in collaborating to ensure that the kernel provides the latest features combined with the highest levels of quality, security and performance.

We are also proud that many of the top kernel developers recognized in both write-ups are Red Hat employees. For example, Al Viro and David Miller, both Red Hatters, are the top two known individual contributors noted in the Linux Foundation report, with many others from Red Hat listed among the top 30. The top 10 individual contributors have contributed almost 15 percent of the changes, and the top 30 have contributed 30 percent. See the list of individual contributors in the article.

While Red Hat is the largest corporate contributor to the kernel, that’s not where the story ends. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has about 1,200 components beyond the kernel, and each will have its community of contributors, both commercial and non-commercial. Different components will be areas of strength for different contributors, such as Sun Microsystems’ leadership in the Open Office project. However, Red Hat is fortunate to have leading members in many of these communities, which provides us with a way to canvass for capabilities that will meet our partners and customers needs. Being able to supply bug fixes for a component is an important benefit of open source development, but being able to influence features and strategy are even more important, and this is an area where Red Hat is preeminent.

The Linux Foundation’s article notes that “the Linux kernel is one of the largest and most successful open source projects that has ever come about.” We’re proud to have made leading contributions to this project.

It’s been a while since JBoss World was last held in the U.S. in June 2006 in Las Vegas, but community, customer and partner interest for JBoss technology and the JBoss World event continues to grow. In fact, JBoss World Orlando is the biggest JBoss World yet, with close to 800 attendees!

While over 32 percent of attendees identify themselves as developers or engineers, the other cool statistic is that nearly 38 percent of all attendees hold CxO, VP, Director or Architect roles. This diversity will provide a great opportunity for the JBoss.org community and JBoss Enterprise Middleware customers to rub elbows and exchange ideas on how to get the most value from JBoss technologies. It’s clear that JBoss Enterprise Middleware has the attention of IT decision makers more than ever before. Why? Customers are finding that open source middleware delivers greater value than alternatives. They are deploying more and more mission-critical applications and services, and they are expanding their open source middleware reference architectures beyond the application server.

Attendees at JBoss World will find much to learn at this year’s Orlando event, kicking off tomorrow, February 13, with an agenda that offers sessions including Executive Insights, Next-Generation Web Applications, Services and Integration, Core Platform Technologies and Optimize, Secure and Manage. We also have Birds of a Feather and JBoss In Action sessions for those interested in the finest level of detail.

So for those of you who are registered for JBoss World, we look forward to seeing you in Orlando! If you won’t be able to make it to the event, keep up-to-date on our latest announcements by reading the press releases and related blogs.

Contribution by Bryan Che, Product Manager at Red Hat

We’re pleased to announce today the general availability of JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 for Windows and Linux. JBoss Developer Studio provides a certified open source development environment that includes and integrates:

• Eclipse
• Eclipse Tooling
• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Developer Studio provides a host of powerful features, such as Seam tools, powerful Ajax capabilities, a Visual Page Editor with WYSIWYG editing of JSF pages and RichFaces Ajax components, robust Hibernate capabilities and much more.

One of the main benefits of using JBoss Developer Studio is that it pre-integrates and certifies tooling and runtime components together. When you use JBoss Developer Studio:

• You don’t have to worry about whether all the plugins you use will work together or require incompatible dependencies.
• You’ll have the assurance that all your runtime libraries like Hibernate or Seam are properly matched with each other and already installed into JBoss Application Server.
• You’ll know that the particular Eclipse plugins you have work precisely with the runtime libraries and containers in your development environment.
• You can easily upgrade to new technologies because all the matching tooling, runtime components, and dependencies will be provided to you in an integrated installer.
• You can deploy your development platform with confidence because Red Hat supports JBoss Enterprise Application Platform releases for five years.

In addition to Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Developer Studio also includes a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network access for development use. Even if you’re a Windows-based developer, you may want to take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s built-in virtualization capabilities to run multiple Windows guests for different development and test environments.

Many of you know that we had released a of couple betas under the name, Red Hat Developer Studio. During the beta process, we found that it would be advantageous to leverage the powerful JBoss developer brand more clearly. So, as we release this new offering, we are officially christening it JBoss Developer Studio.

JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 is available now as a subscription offering for $99. To summarize, JBoss Developer Studio includes:

• Eclipse
• Eclipse Tooling
• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• RHN Access
• Support for Windows and Linux

To learn more about JBoss Developer Studio, visit: here.

An important milestone has been reached for the upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio product from Red Hat. We have completed open sourcing the former Exadel Studio Pro plugins from the Red Hat/Exadel Partnership that we announced back at EclipseCon in March.

These plugins, along with the former JBoss IDE plugins, and some new ones (e.g. a Seam plugin) are all available at the JBoss Tools project at jboss.org. You can visit the JBoss Tools project to check out the source code and download the latest versions of the plugins. And, of course, we welcome your participation in the open source project too.

One of the most exciting aspects of our open sourcing Exadel’s plugins at jboss.org is that this marks the first time that developer tools of this caliber have been available in open source. Previously, all the major Eclipse-based tools vendors built their offerings on top of an open source foundation (Eclipse). But, they kept their most desirable features proprietary and sold them to customers. At Red Hat, we believe the best way to help developers is to provide them with a powerful and completely open source set of development tools and platforms.

For developers that want the latest versions of our plugins and like to remain at the tip of our technology, all are welcome to go to JBoss Tools and tailor-assemble your own ideal development environment. For developers that prefer an integrated, supportable and stable development environment that offers great technology, Red Hat has a solution too. Later this summer, Red Hat will be introducing a new product around the JBoss Tools project: Red Hat Developer Studio.

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide a subscription that includes and integrates:

• Eclipse 3.3 from the Eclipse Europa release
• Production-ready versions of the plugins from JBoss Tools and elsewhere — all tested and integrated together along with their dependencies into Eclipse
• The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes production-ready versions of JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and Seam
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat Network access for updates

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide one installer that sets up your entire development environment: Eclipse, plugins and JBoss runtime platforms all integrated together. Of course, like all of our products, Red Hat Developer Studio will be 100 percent open source. And it will run on a variety of platforms like Linux and Windows.

So, Red Hat will be offering a variety of solutions for developers. The plugins we have just open sourced at JBoss Tools will provide rich capabilities around many of the other projects at jboss.org. And Red Hat Developer Studio will build upon JBoss Tools to offer a completely integrated and certified open source development environment. Please check out JBoss Tools and let us know what you think.

See this blog here too.

The success of JBoss has hinged on grassroots adoption by developers and users of our open source technologies. Thank you for your support over the years! With our relaunch of JBoss.org, we are hoping to fuel that innovative spirit further and keep our users informed and excited about our new technologies and directions.

There are many types of developers, of course. While many will download our open source components and tools and support themselves via our forums and wikis, many corporate developers just want a set of solid tools they can use and a well tested platform to develop and deploy on. While they may think innovation is cool–and will factor it into future applications–stability is what gets deployed today. They have a job to do and want vendors like Red Hat to make their lives simpler.

At Red Hat, we are focused on driving preference for our Open Source Architecture as early in the development lifecycle as possible. So, we are building on the grassroots relationship JBoss has with developers and consolidating our developer-related efforts into a single strategy across all of Red Hat.

Towards that end, we have launched the following new subscriptions:

• Red Hat Developer Professional is designed for corporate developers and individuals.
• Red Hat Developer Enterprise is designed for Independent Software Vendors, larger development organizations and mission critical development projects.
• Red Hat Developer Studio is an Eclipse-based development tools environment that integrates tools for Linux, Java, and Web 2.0 application development.

The first two offerings provide full access and developer support for ALL Red Hat certified products (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, etc.) under a single subscription. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to get access to any/all of our certified bits and support them in the use of those bits as they’re developing their applications.

The Developer Studio subscription is due out in the summer timeframe and will integrate all of our Eclipse-based tools, including the Exadel Studio Pro and Ajax technologies, into a development environment that works well with and includes our certified platforms. So, developers will not only get the tools but also access to our certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss platforms.

This is a first step, of course, and as always, if you have cool ideas of other things we should be doing to help developers, let us know.