Red Hat, Intel, Aptana, JetBrains boost developer wares

Red Hat, Intel, Aptana, and JetBrains are unveiling various software development efforts this week, ranging from support for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to a PHP IDE and a Language-Oriented Programming environment.

Red Hat has signed on as a Google Contributor, meaning the company can offer developer and production support for GWT, Red Hat announced on Thursday.

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Red Hat will leverage the JBoss Seam architecture enabling developers to combine enterprise Java with view-layer technologies such as GWT, RichFaces, and Spring to build rich Internet applications. The Google technology improves Web experiences by enabling developers to use existing Java tools to build AJAX systems, Red Hat said.

Support for GWT will be provided in coming months as part of a JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription. Red Hat said it has completed some preliminary integration with GWT and Seam.

“We believe developers should be able to select technology such as GWT, Spring Framework and Adobe Flex while using JBoss to provide the best operational and most flexible platform for running their applications,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat’s JBoss middleware business, in a statement released by Red Hat.

Red Hat has partnered with Google before on efforts such as JBoss Portal integration, Red Hat said.

Aptana on Thursday is releasing the 1.0 version of Aptana PHP, a free, open-source IDE for PHP application development. The IDE extends the Aptana Studio Eclipse-based IDE for AJAX and Web development, the company said.

Featured in Aptana PHP are capabilities such as code assist and syntax checking that support PHP, AJAX libraries, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. PHP debugging and refactoring tools are included as well. An internal PHP server is featured for previewing PHP pages in multiple browsers.

Aptana also offers Aptana Cloud, a cloud-based application hosting and lifecycle management service for deploying PHP applications to production servers and managing projects via hosted source control and application monitoring. This can be done from within Aptana Studio.

JetBrains this week is offering a beta version of Meta Programming System (MPS), an environment that implements the Language-Oriented Programming paradigm for building specialized languages for software development. Domain-specific languages and applications can be built and existing languages extended.

The company has been using MPS for developing some of its own products since 2006.

“When we started working on MPS back in 2003, it was a research project that could do very little but was a lot of fun to play with,” said Sergey Dmitriev, JetBrains CEO and author of the MPS concept, in a statement released by the company. “However, we have always been very serious about extensively using our own products, and right now we are already using MPS to develop new products.

The 1.0 release of MPS is planned for early 2009. MPS will be free, with a major part of its code being open source. It will be offered under an Apache license.

Boosting development of applications for multi-core processors, Intel this week launched a public beta version of Intel Parallel Composer, which is to be part of the Intel Parallel Studio suite.

[ Formore on multicore chips, see “Multicore: New chips mean new challenges for developers” ]

Parallel Composer features compilers and libraries for Microsoft Visual Studio C++ developers, offering support for parallel expression within Visual Studio.

The Parallel Studio suite is to be a parallelism toolkit for multi-core software development. Products in it work together. Other components of the suite will be offered in beta releases next year. The full product suite is to be ready some time after the beta releases.