Red Hat Takes Over Ajax Development Tools, Opens Mexican Ops

Published: March 13, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Red Hat may now own the JBoss middleware stack, but it by no means has the market cornered for Web development tools. While the JBoss Enterprise Middleware stack has very good development tools, and so does the company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, there are a lot of ways to code Web applications these days.

And that is why Red Hat has partnered with Exadel, which provides Asynchronous Java and XML (Ajax) and other development tools. As part of the partnership, which was announced at the EclipseCon user conference for the open source Eclipse application development framework, Exadel will open source its Studio Pro development tool as well as the related RichFaces and Ajax4jfs products under the LGLP license underneath the JBoss project. In fact, these tools are immediately available as JBoss RichFaces and JBoss Ajax4jfs.

Red Hat will be open sourcing the Exadel Studio Pro product as Red Hat Developer Studio, which is expected to be available from Red Hat under a GPL license before the end of June. Gavin King, who manages the Hibernate and JBoss Seam projects at Red Hat will be managing the Exadel products. Exactly how Red Hat will deliver an integrated development environment that includes JBoss IDE and Studio Pro remains unclear. But both tools use the Eclipse Framework, so elements of both tools can snap into Eclipse easily enough.

For its part, Exadel is basically looking for a way to get out of product development and software support and get back to its professional services business.

Also last week, Red Hat announced that it has opened up an office in Mexico City as a means of expanding directly into the Latin American market for Linux and open source software. Gabriel Szulik, who has been named general manager of Red Hat's Latin American operations, manages offices in Brazil and Argentina, which are big on Linux, and partnerships across the region. These countries like Linux enough that business there supported a South American Linux distribution, the formerly independent Conectiva, which is now part of Franco-American Linux distributor Mandriva. (Incidentally, Gabriel Szulik is not related to Red Hat's chairman and chief executive officer, Matthew Szulik.) Juan Manuel Ruiz has been named director for Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and the Andean countries.

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