CodeGear, Red Hat add dev tools for Eclipse, Java

CodeGear and Red Hat plan product rollouts on Monday to enhance Java development on the Eclipse platform.

CodeGear is unveiling JGear, featuring a set of Eclipse plug-ins and server software to address Java development challenges. Red Hat, meanwhile, will offer a beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio, an IDE leveraging Eclipse as well as Red Hat and JBoss software.

The CodeGear software is intended to improve the open source Eclipse platform for use with Java.

“We’ve looked at the three biggest pain points for developers using Eclipse solutions,” which are individual productivity, Java application performance, and team collaboration, said Michael Swindell, vice president at CodeGear.

Capabilities in JGear had been introduced in CodeGear’s JBuilder IDE. With JGear, these features are being extended to internally configured Eclipse platforms or a commercial Eclipse IDE.

Featured in the product line are:

* JGear Performance for Eclipse 3.2, a plug-in for performance tuning and visual development.

* JGear LiveSource for Eclipse, a plug-in featuring a graphical Enterprise JavaBeans workbench and a Web services designer.

* JGear Team for Eclipse, providing an agile team collaboration and development and featuring a client plug-in and a Windows server component.

JGear’s Team Client is a plug-in based on the TeamInsight collaboration foundation featured as part of JBuilder. A real-time view of project responsibilities is provided. Also featured are extensions to the Eclipse Mylin project providing a task-focused UI.

The Team Server component includes ProjectAssist, which is the JGear team administrator client for single-click server installation and team project creation. Also included in Term Server is a development server stack based on components such as the Subversion version control system and the Bugzilla bug tracker.

While team-based collaboration could be construed as part of an application lifecycle management system, which is supposed to be the forte of CodeGear parent company Borland, Swindell was not deterred.

“We’re building a team collaboration tool for the development phase of the software organization,” Swindell said. Borland focuses on six spaces of the application lifecycle: planning, definition, design, development, testing, and delivery. “Our solution is a team solution that works within the development phase of the application lifecycle,” he stressed.

JGear plug-ins will be available around August 20. JGear Performance and JGear LiveSource each costs $299, while the Team Client plug-in is $399. Team Server is $599.

Red Hat Developer Studio is an open source, Eclipse-based IDE for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Featured are products contributed to Red Hat by Exadel in March: The Exadel Studio Pro development environment; RichFaces, which is a JSF (JavaServer Faces) component library; and Ajax4JSF, melding AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and JSF capabilities.

Also featured is JBoss middleware, such as the JBoss Seam programming framework and Hibernate object-to-relational software for connecting applications to databases. A JBoss application server runtime is included as well, as is software from the Eclipse Europa technology release. Visual tools are featured for building Seam applications.

With the Red Hat offering, developers do not have to cobble together different open source frameworks before they can start developing, Red Hat said.

“The idea is to help [developers] develop their apps on top of JBoss middleware,” said Brian Che, Red Hat product manager for developer offerings.

Red Hat Developer Studio provides a development environment for enterprise Java, AJAX, and SOA applications, Red Hat said.

With the product, Red Hat is integrating developer tools with an application platform, saving developers from integration issues, according to Vishwanath Venugopalan, analyst for enterprise software at The 451 Group.

“Traditionally, software developers developing on open source platforms have had to expend pretty significant effort on the complex tasks of maintaining a cohesive development environment,” Venugopalan said.

The Red Hat product, though, does lack integrations with software such as the Spring development framework for Java, said Venugopalan. But it is understandable that the Red Hat offering will not be pre-integrated with everything, he noted.

“This integration of tools and [an] application platform will be the biggest win for developers. It’s a recognition of the importance of developer productivity in the context of commercial adoption of open source,” said Venugopalan.

A general release of Red Hat Developer Studio could happen as soon as late September. The beta release is available on the Red Hat Web site. A copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be included with the general release.

Red Hat plans to sell subscriptions to Red Hat Developer Studio.