Red Hat on Monday is shipping JBoss Developer Studio, an Eclipse-based IDE that bundles open source tooling and runtime software so that developers do not need to gather these components themselves.

Featuring JBoss Enterprise Middleware and technologies from Exadel, the product is intended to provide a lifecycle environment for application development. The beta version of the product, which was known as Red Hat Developer Studio, was released in August, and there have been more than 50,000 downloads of technologies within the product since then.

"It integrates powerful tools for building rich Web and AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] applications. It also includes JBoss runtime components like the application server and Hibernate and JBoss Seam," which is a Web application framework, said Bryan Che, Red Hat product marketing manager.

JBoss Developer Studio also incorporates Eclipse tooling, the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for development use; in addition, developers get access to the Red Hat Network. Tooling is featured for technologies including Java EE, JBoss jBPM, Struts, and Spring IDE. Developers can run the same runtime environment in development as in production.

With the IDE, JBoss is saving developers from having to assemble their own development environment with multiple technologies. "This is often a difficult task," Che said. Developers, for example, do not need to integrate Seam with the JBoss application server.

"We're able to provide developers an out-of-the-box experience where they're ready to go," he said.

Exadel technology in the IDE includes sophisticated Eclipse tooling and AJAX technology, Che said. Exadel's software was offered to Red Hat via an open source mode in March.

The IDE's interface and its packaging of multiple open source technologies were cited as benefits by an industry analyst.

"I think it's a pretty compelling user interface to most of JBoss's middleware products with a particular focus on JBoss Seam," said Vishwanath Venugopalan, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group.

While individuals themselves could package the Eclipse plug-ins and runtime components together to avoid Red Hat's $99 price tag for JBoss Developer Studio, doing so would be "an effort that you need to do over and over again," Venugopalan said.

JBoss Seam, Che said, has been submitted to the Java Community Process for consideration as a new Java standard called Web Beans. "It's going to be an easy, standardized way to build AJAX applications," said Che.

While JBoss Developer Studio is available for a $99 subscription, support for the platform costs extra. Support agreements start at $3,500 a year. But users get access to all Red Hat and JBoss software through these agreements, Che said.