The partnership with Exadel that we have announced today is very important not only because for the first time, developers will have access to a very rich Eclipse-based toolset that is entirely available in open source, but also because it is part of a "Grand Unification" goal we have for 2007.

 

 

The Partnership

Exadel will open source its commercial products - "Exadel Studio Pro" and RichFaces - at JBoss.org as "Red Hat Developer Studio" and "JBoss RichFaces", respectively. Exadel is also moving its popular Ajax4jsf project, currently hosted on java.net, to JBoss.org, where it will become "JBoss Ajax4jsf".

 

 

While JBoss RichFaces and JBoss Ajax4jsf have already been opensourced at and can be downloaded from JBoss.org, Red Hat Developer Studio will only be available in open source by summer 2007: given the important size of its codebase, we will need more time to finalize that work. In the meantime, you can download "Exadel Studio Pro" for free. Once fully opensourced, binaries for all of the individual plugins will be made available for free while the "Red Hat Developer Studio" will only be made available as part of a Developer Subscription.

 

 

From a licensing standpoint, JBoss Ajax4jsf and JBoss RichFaces have been opensourced under the LGPL while Red Hat Developer Studio will be opensourced under a GPL-based license (except for JBoss IDE plugins which will keep their current license).

 

 

Red Hat and Exadel will jointly develop the three projects going forward, including integration with existing JBoss platform technologies such as JBoss Seam. That work will be done under JBoss's leadership. It is worth mentioning that given the size and the expertise of the Exadel team, the JBoss community can expect an acceleration in the number of IDE features that will be made available for JEMS projects, so that's very good news.

The Grand Unification

This partnership with Exadel enables one of the three axes of the "Grand Unification" strategy we will focus on in 2007. Here are these three axes:
  • Management: the need to manage JEMS components from a unified management environment is not new as this work started 2 years ago with the development of JBoss ON. This work is led by Greg Hinkle and Richard Friedman. Rich is now responsible for the future combined JBoss ON/Red Hat Network roadmaps.
  • Programming Model: providing a unified programming model accros JEMS and beyond is the role of Seam, effort started and led by Gavin King. This layer provides seamless integration of EE/JEMS environments. Some of this work is being standardized under the Web Beans JSR. I am very excited by the possibilities offered by Seam and we are putting lots of attention (and resources!) into it.
  • Tooling: providing an extensive and integrated tooling suite accros JEMS is the last axis of the grand unification strategy. This axis just got kick-started by our partnership with Exadel.

Gavin's Leadership

The very good news here is that Gavin King is taking a leadership role in that "Grand Unification" and will lead the vision of two of these three axes: tooling and programming model. Given Gavin's credibility in giving back productivity to the developers, you should expect great innovations. I am personally thrilled to see Gavin take on that strategic role, Congratulations Gavin!

 

 

Last but not least, I'd like to thank Ram Venkataraman and Bryan Che for having initiated and led that partnership, congratulations guys.