Red Hat to offer certified software stacks online

Red Hat plans to fully certify and support three open-source application stacks early next year, the Linux distribution company announced Tuesday. The stacks will be available online via a subscription model through the Red Hat Network.

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The move to creating certified, supported and standardized stacks of software is one way a number of vendors, including SpikeSource and SourceLabs, are packaging open-source technology. The aim is to give developers more confidence in using open-source software. The standardized software stacks also are designed to lessen the time developers have to spend configuring and testing various pieces of software to ensure that applications work well together.

Red Hat initially plans to offer three stacks of open-source components -- a Web Application Stack, a Java Web Application Stack and an Enterprise Java Stack, according to a company release. All three will run on the company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

The Web Application Stack is designed to help developers create simple Web sites and applications. It includes support for LAMP components such as the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language. Developers may also opt for the PostgreSQL database, according to Red Hat. LAMP is an open-source Web development platform based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and programming languages PHP, Perl or Python. It derives its name from the initial letters of the software components.

Focusing on developers who are building more dynamic Web applications, the Java Web Application Stack supports all of the components of the Web Application Stack and adds support for the Apache Tomcat Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) container. Also in the stack are updates and support for Java development libraries and tools such as Apache Struts, Apache Axis, Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, Ant, Junit, Jython, Log4J and XML (Extensible Markup Language) libraries.

Including all the components of the Java Web Application Stack, the Enterprise Java Stack also comes with support for a full Java application server based on the ObjectWeb Consortium's Java Open Application Project (JOnAS) project.

Each of the three stacks includes free access to Red Hat's Eclipse-based Developer Suite, according to the company.

Subscription pricing will start from $599 per server.