Red Hat tools up for Ajax

Exadel partnership builds open-source giant's stack credentials

Linux giant Red Hat is partnering with Exadel in a move that will see it bolster its software stack through tools for creating rich applications.

Exadel will open-source all its products and slot its Ajax4jsf project into Red Hat’s JBoss.org community. In return, Red Hat will give Exadel plenty of exposure to sell services through the customer reach afforded by its Enterprise Linux and JBoss Jems middleware lines. Red Hat also said it would integrate Exadel capabilities in its products to simplify developer work.

The Exadel tools are based on the open-source Eclipse framework but add capabilities that Red Hat sees as useful in building more dynamic Web 2.0-style applications, for example through Ajax coding.

"It’s one of the first times that a complete, high-calibre Java IDE has been open-sourced," said Sacha Labourey, JBoss chief technology officer. “If you look at the vendors out there, most of them are proprietary.”

Adding Exadel’s capabilities would accelerate development for Red Hat customers. “When we were just JBoss we had some pretty advanced users but now we have been acquired we face a much bigger market.”

Separately, Labourey played down the recent departure of JBoss founder Marc Fleury from Red Hat, less than a year after Red Hat agreed the acquisition of JBoss.

“It’s a big deal in that we lost the public face of JBoss but from an engineering and marketing [point of view] things have been pretty settled.”

The Exadel announcement was made at the EclipseCon conference that is running until Thursday, 8 March in Santa Clara, California.