Construction- and architectural-industry analysts don’t spend a lot of time on hammers and saws; IT-industry analysts don’t spend a lot of time on integrated development environments and frameworks. Yet if you like to design and build physical things with wood and metal as I do, you quickly realize why you have to have both claw and ball-peen hammers and a wide selection of teeth-per-inch in your saw blades. That is a weird way of saying that I have not paid enough attention to open source software (OSS) development tools in this blog space. This is primarily because shortly after I trained as a COBOL programmer in 1969/1970, I became an IT marketeer and never did anything really productive.
That is going to change in a couple of ways this month. Maybe you have noticed that Open Source now gets its own tab right above these words and on the ebizQ.net home page. Along with SOA, BPM, Security and so forth, Open Source coverage will be expanded and part of that expansion will be a good hard look at the tools available to build OSS applications and deployment software, such as operating systems and middleware. In fact, I plan to give OSS tools the same “weight” of my attention as I have given packaged applications and middleware/Linux as I continue to blog under this new format and also add feature articles that go into more depth than a blog post can.
So the timing of this Red Hat story last week and my change in emphasis was interesting. When I talked to Tim Yeaton of Red Hat back in May, he suggested I get up to speed on Red Hat’s relationship with Exadel in order to better understand where they were going to help developers. There was speculation in the press at the time that Red Hat would be acquiring some of its solutions partners but he said look at Exadel to see Red Hat's direction.
I had that meeting last week just as Red Hat was expanding its developer-centric efforts. JBoss.org, which is to middleware at Red Hat what Fedora is to operating software, created the JBoss Tools project, a step toward delivering Red Hat Developer Studio, an entirely OSS integrated development environment (IDE), later this summer. Exadel, an OSS professional services firm, had contributed Eclipse plug-ins, Ajax4jsf and RichFaces in March 2007 to get the ball rolling on the OSS IDE. (If you can’t wait, starting last week, developers can download plug-ins from JBoss Tools to compile their own IDE with tooling for Java EE and Ajax development.)
Not being a developer guy, I would have thought Eclipse already delivered on that need but Red Hat believes that pieces of Eclipse above "core Eclipse" are not OSS and that effectively that makes Eclipse just a framework rather than an IDE. (In addition to a definition debate between framework and IDE, note from this reference in a recent post that we will also be following a growing debate about what is truly OSS, what is hybrid OSS—and whether that matters—and what is out and out freeware masquerading as OSS.)
One thing I will be looking for and that my marketing development/investment research background says should be a natural is a connection between the Red Hat Developer Studio and the Red Hat Exchange, Red Hat’s growing list of solutions provider partners. If Exchange members use the Studio, it is going to be easier for other community members to add on to and expand the Exchange catalog. If the OSS movement is going to continue its momentum, it needs to keep pace with activity at Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere to make thousands of OSS minisolutions available to the community (also called objects, applets, enterprise application components, services, and so forth over the years).
Red Hat says stay tuned. We ask you to stay tuned as well as ebizQ.net turns up the volume on OSS. Click that XML or RSS button to the right right now.
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