Exadel is open sourcing its commercial RichFaces and Studio Pro products and consolidating its Ajax4jsf project at Red Hat's jboss.org as JBoss RichFaces, Red Hat Developer Studio, and JBoss Ajax4jsf, respectively.
Red Hat and Exadel have formed a strategic partnership to continue developing these three projects and will be integrating them with other JBoss projects like JBoss Seam.

What does this mean for Red Hat?

Through this partnership, Red Hat gains mature, proven Eclipse-based developer tools to complement its JBoss Enterprise Middleware platform. These products lay the groundwork and accelerate the the timeframe for Red Hat to deliver a more comprehensive developer program and strategy for the Red Hat integrated platform.

What does this mean for Exadel?

Exadel will shift its business away from software and product management and focus on its core strength in professional services. By aligning itself with Red Hat, Exadel also ensures the continuity and growth of its three products.

Why is this significant for developers?

For the first time, developers will have access to a high caliber Eclipse-based development environment that is available entirely in open source. Red Hat Developer Studio provides an advanced, enterprise-level Web application development environment for leveraging open source, JEE, and AJAX technologies within Eclipse. It combines visual and source-oriented development tools with support for multiple open source technologies, including JSF, Struts, Hibernate, Seam, MyFaces, Oracle ADF, Shale, and Spring.

JBoss Ajax4jsf and JBoss RichFaces will enable developers to add AJAX to their JSF applications without having to write any JavaScript. This makes developing rich Internet applications simple and a natural extension of building JEE applications.

Moreover, Red Hat will be enhancing and extending the functionality of JBoss Ajax4jsf, JBoss RichFaces, and Red Hat Developer Studio through integration with other JBoss platform technologies such as JBoss Seam and JBoss jBPM. Developers benefit from an integrated, highly productive, and rich development experience with Red Hat.

When will Ajax4jsf, RichFaces, and Exadel Studio Pro be available in open source?

JBoss Ajax4jsf and JBoss RichFaces are immediately available today at http://jboss.org. Red Hat expects to have Exadel Studio Pro available in open source as Red Hat Developer Studio by Summer 2007.

How can I get Ajax4jsf and RichFaces?

JBoss Ajax4jsf's new open source home is at http://jboss.org/projects/jbossAjax4jsf. JBoss RichFace's new open source home is at http://jboss.org/projects/jbossrichfaces. You can download binaries, access source code, and participate in the open source communities for JBoss Ajax4jsf and JBoss RichFaces at those sites.

What is happening to Exadel Studio Pro?

Red Hat and Exadel are open sourcing and rebranding Exadel Studio Pro as Red Hat Developer Studio. Red Hat Developer Studio's open source home will be at http://jboss.org/projects/rhdevstudio. However, as this project has a much larger code base than Ajax4jsf or RichFaces, open sourcing it will take some time. Red Hat expects to have Red Hat Developer Studio in open source around Summer 2007. In the meantime, Exadel is making an extended evaluation version of Exadel Studio Pro available at no cost. This evaluation version should expire around the time that Red Hat Developer Studio is available in open source. To get the extended evaluation of Exadel Studio Pro, visit http://jboss.org/projects/rhdevstudio.

What will happen to JBoss IDE ?

JBoss IDE will be joining the broader open source Red Hat Developer Studio project. The Red Hat Developer Studio project will make available many individual Eclipse plugins, including all the JBoss IDE and former Exadel Studio Pro plugins. It will not, however, release a completely packaged and installable IDE like JBoss IDE did. Instead, Red Hat will make individual plugins available for developers to install and update. For those developers that want an out-of-box developer IDE, Red Hat will offer subscriptions that include integrated, installable, and supported versions of Red Hat Developer Studio along with JBoss and Red Hat platforms and components.

Who will "own" the code base for the new Ajax4jsf, RichFaces, and Red Hat Developer Studio projects?

As part of this partnership, Exadel is licensing to Red Hat all of its code for Ajax4jsf, RichFaces, and Studio Pro Furthermore, Red Hat will retain all rights for new development at JBoss. Finally, and best of all, because JBoss Ajax4jsf, JBoss RichFaces, and Red Hat Developer Studio are open source, in many ways these projects will belong to the open source community.

Who will lead these new projects at JBoss?

As with all other open source projects at JBoss, Red Hat expects that there will be many outside contributors—particularly Exadel—joining the development of JBoss Ajax4jsf, JBoss RichFaces, and Red Hat Developer Studio. However, as with other JBoss projects, Red Hat will ultimately lead the roadmap and implementations of these new projects.

What is Exadel's role going to be in developing JBoss Ajax4jsf, JBoss RichFaces, and Red Hat Developer Studio?

As part of its long-term partnership with Red Hat, Exadel has committed its entire product development organization to work solely with Red Hat and the open source community on the new JBoss Ajax4jsf, JBoss RichFaces, and Red Hat Developer Studio projects. Red Hat is excited to have Exadel's engineers, designers, testers, writers, and other resources contributing to these projects.

Why does Red Hat Developer Studio use Eclipse and not NetBeans?

Red Hat Developer Studio's original code bases of Exadel Studio Pro and JBoss IDE were already based on Eclipse, so supporting Eclipse was natural. Also, Eclipse is currently the leading and most popular IDE framework for developers. Building on Eclipse, then, will help many developers in using Red Hat Developer Studio. Finally, Red Hat is one of the founding members of Eclipse and is committed to building out the ecosystem of products around the Eclipse IDE platform.

JBoss also has a strong tradition of building tools around the Eclipse platfom. This makes Eclipse a natural choice for Red Hat's developer tools. Having said that, Red Hat will continue to work with the community and other vendors to expand tooling for their development platforms.

Will JBoss continue to be bundled with NetBeans?

As an open source vendor, Red Hat strongly believes in choice. Red Hat will definitely continue its relationship with Sun to provide a strong solution that ties Red Hat's runtimes with NetBeans. Red Hat will continue actively working with the NetBeans community to provide them with a viable deployment platform.

Why not release Red Hat Developer Studio under Eclipse.org instead of independently under JBoss.org?

Eclipse.org projects use the EPL (Eclipse Public License). Red Hat is looking to license Red Hat Developer Studio under a GPL-based license. This license would be incompatible with the Eclipse license. Red Hat is also considering adding more JBoss-specific tooling that will bring better user experiences for developers using JBoss runtimes. This again is not suited for Eclipse.org, which is geared towards general purpose tooling.

If Red Hat is looking to use a GPL-based license for Red Hat Developer Studio, what will happen to existing plug-ins available under other licenses?

Existing open source plugins will continue to be licensed under their respective licenses—typically EPL or LGPL. All new plugins will be licensed under the GPL-based license.

Red Hat Developer Studio runs on Windows and Linux. What about Mac?

Red Hat is committed to multi-platform development and deployment for JBoss. Although Red Hat Developer Studio will not initially have Mac support , Red Hat will consider supporting it in the future.

How can I get a subscription to Red Hat Developer Studio, JBoss Ajax4jsf, and JBoss RichFaces?

Once Red Hat has finished open sourcing Red Hat Developer Studio, it will offer developers a subscription that includes an integrated, certified, and installable Red Hat Developer Studio release as well as JBoss and Red Hat enterprise platforms. These platforms will include JBoss Ajax4jsf and JBoss RichFaces as well as other products like Hibernate, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Application Server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And, they will all be integrated and certified to work together as well as with Red Hat Developer Studio.