Red Hat Developer Suite 3: A well-integrated, seasoned, and supported Eclipse IDE

This interview is edited and republished from the original source.

A Dev Fu Interview with Andrew Overholt and Bryan Che

On 30 August 2006, Red Hat released version 3 of it’s Eclipse-based Red Hat Developer Suite of developer tools, the latest in a line of Red Hat Eclipse-based IDEs that goes back for several years. To find out more about the developer suite, what it does, how to get it, and why you’d want to we talked to Andrew Overholt, a Senior Software Engineer on The Eclipse Team, and Bryan Che, Product Manager for Developers at Red Hat. Here’s what they had to say.

Devel-fu: Could you introduce yourselves and tell us what you do?

Bryan: I’m Bryan Che, and I’m the product manager for developers at Red Hat.In that role, I manage the strategy and direction for our products related to developers, both from a developer tool standpoint, and also from a developer platform standpoint.

Andrew: I am Andrew Overholt; I’m a senior software engineer with Red Hat, Canada. I work on the Eclipse team. Specifically, I’m working on Fedora Eclipse, and Red Hat Developer Suite.

Devel-fu: So to begin, what is the Red Hat Developer Suite?

Andrew: The Red Hat Developer Suite is an Eclipse-based, multi-language, integrated development environment-based suite, delivered via Red Hat Network as RPMs.

Devel-fu: Could you give me a little bit of the history about how the Developer Suite came about, and why?

Andrew: Sure. A few years ago Red Hat assigned a team to investigate the feasibility of doing an open source IDE, or an Integrated Development Environment. There were a few options that they looked into and they concluded that, at the time, the recently open sourced Eclipse best fit the needs. So that was around 2001 when the Eclipse consortium was first formed and Red Hat was a founding member.

Red Hat did some work involving native compilation with GCJ of Eclipse in 2002. That work became sort of a technology preview, and the Red Hat Developer Suite was born. We’ve been shipping it since around 2003, I believe.

Bryan: One of the reasons that we decided to go ahead with Red Hat Developer Suite - and that we continue to work on it today - is as a platform company, we understand that we have an important commitment to ensure developers have the proper tools to develop on our platform. Historically, that was primarily Linux. But now with Red Hat’s recent JBoss acquisition, that will come to include JBoss’ products as well.

A platform can be terrific for running applications, but unless developers are writingapplications for it, then the platform won’t as useful as it could be. So we want to make sure that we support developers who are writing applications, porting applications - in fact, support whatever they do in their development activity on our platforms.

Devel-fu: What sort of things can you do with the Developer Suite, then? What functionality does it have?

Andrew: The Red Hat Developer Suite starts with the base of the Eclipse SDK, the Software Development Kit (SDK) - that includes the Eclipse platform as a whole. Then the Java development tools (JDT), and tools to develop more plug-ins and add more functionality to Eclipse: the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE).

We also have other language specific tools. Complementing the Java tools, we have the C and C++ development tools, known as the CDT. And in Red Hat Developer Suite Version 3 we’re including work surrounding the GNU Autotools.

Then, since we’re trying to target developers across the entire life-cycle of application development, we ship functionality for change management tools, issue tracking - Bugzilla for example; tools for packaging RPMs, and extensions to the CDT for profiling using OProfile.

We are shipping the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF); and the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) and the Visual Editor (VE), so you can visually edit graphical applications in Swing, SWT or AWT.

And we’re shipping tools for Web developers. We have tools for PHP developers, the PHP Eclipse-Plugin, and the Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP), which includes tools for HTML, JSP, XML tools, J2EE server tools, Web services-it has quite a lot in it.

Devel-fu: This is all open source, is it not?

Andrew: Yes, yes. It’s all open source.

Devel-fu: And it’s also available by subscription in the Red Hat Network. So why wouldn’t someone just download the components and build this for themselves? Why subscribe through the Red Hat Network?

Bryan: There are a couple of reasons. First, I should say that right now, we’re including Red Hat Developer Suite with any other Red Hat subscription that you’ve purchased.So for example if you have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, then you can go ahead and download the Red Hat Developer Suite for free.

But to your question, when you go to Eclipse.org and you download Eclipse, you’re getting the framework, not all the tools for the specific application development that you want to do. The Red Hat Developer Suite provides an integrated, tested, certified, and supported set of tools. If you want to do C development or Web application development, for example, we’ve done the certification and testing to make sure that the tools work together, and to make sure that they’re going to work on your Linux box, so you can do that type of development with confidence.

We also understand it’s important not only that the tools work together, but that they work with the environment and the development platform that you’re targeting. So we put effort into making sure that all this works together well, and that it’s a seamless experience.

Andrew: I think it’s important to add that by getting the tools via Red Hat Network, it becomes easy for system administrators to manage multiple development boxes - managing all the dependencies is taken care of automatically.

Devel-fu: What’s the most compelling differentiator for the Red Hat Developer Suite, in your opinion?

Bryan: For me, the big differentiator is not any individual feature. Obviously, there are a lot of great features. But it’s the cross-integration we’re doing with the tools themselves, and the value we add as a platform provider. One of the key goals that we have for Red Hat Developer Suite is to provide an integrated set of open source tools that will let developers be productive on an open-source platform - notjust an arbitrary set of tools. So when you start doing your application development, you won’t have to worry if this plug-in is interfering with that plug-in, or wonder if this plug-in is going to work with that version of PHP - things like that. We’re doing the engineering work necessary to take that guess work out.

Andrew: I’d echo Bryan’s sentiments here. There are a lot of features, and they’re all really impressive. But it’s the system integration, I think that really is the outstanding feature that Red Hat Developer Suite has. That, and the ease of installation and support.

Devel-fu: Could you give us a look ahead, and perhaps share something that’s planned for the future?

Bryan: Yes. As I mentioned earlier, I think one of the things that you can expect from us going forward with the JBoss acquisition that Red Hat made recently, is there will be a greater focus on expanding Red Hat Developer Suite’s capabilities, and integrating the JBoss set of tools into the suite. In previous releases, we were very focused on our own technology: we had Linux, and we had our previous Red Hat application server. Now, however, you’re going to see us starting to embrace development tools for SOA developments using the JBoss infrastructure, and continuing support for Linux development as well. So you’re going to see a broadening of the tools supported on our expanded platform.

Andrew: We are also continuing to strive towards enabling end-to-end application development on Eclipse. There have been a lot of improvements made to our ChangeLog tools recently that will automatically generate change sets and other information. And we’re continuing to work on our issue tracking through Bugzilla. There are a lot of improvements upstream that we’d like to bring in and integrate into the suite as well.

I’m personally working on some tools to ease the creation and management of RPM packages. Specifically I’m writing a spec file editor. And it’s actually exciting; I think there are a lot of cool features we could add to take that pain away from developers.

Devel-fu: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Andrew: I would just like to say that this release of Red Hat Developer Suite is exciting because it contains all the latest technology. It’s the latest upstream release of the Eclipse SDK, and the latest of all these functional plug-ins. And we’ve integrated and certified it all on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, so I think it’s exciting for that reason.

Devel-fu: Bryan, how about you?

Bryan: No, just that it’s available for you to try if you’re a Red Hat customer. So I’d encourage you to go ahead and download it, and check it out.