Dev Fu: Mystic Coding Arts from Red Hat and JBoss
by Karsten Wade
This is the story of Dev Fu, a portal that provides updated, relevant content to developers trying to get their work done.
A long time ago, Red Hat was “just a Linux company.” (Which has never really been true — more on that below.) As you might know from the old days, people who did their development using Linux also had to be competent system administrators. Some people enjoyed it, many were distracted by it, and Red Hat made daily bread and butter from it.
Over the years, Red Hat has grown to be associated one-to-one with Linux in the minds of many people. While we were bringing customers up to speed on using their new, powerful, open source operating system, we discovered that they needed sysadmin help, lots of training, and more sysadmin help. Red Hat’s original technical support operation and documentation was built primarily around sysadmin support.
But what about the developers? Were they left out in the cold?
Yes, they were, but not entirely. Remember Cygnus, Cygwin, and the cadre of glibc/gcc hackers who came into Red Hat? That is just one example of the numerous products and projects that are far outside of “just Linux.” For another example, the GNOME desktop working environment runs on other UNIX-based OSes besides Linux. Since Red Hat does as much work as possible in upstream open source projects, all distributions and communities can benefit from that work. It is all much more than “just Linux.” But developer support in those days was mainly consultant-based contracts or pointers to the upstream project for community support. Documentation and training remained primarily around system administration.
Over the years, as the adoption of Linux in the enterprise has exploded, more and more corporate developers have Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® as their target deployment platform. But where has actual development and testing occurred? Most often the answer is, “Not on Red Hat.” And why would you want to develop and test without developer-oriented support? After all, now that running Linux on your desktop is easier than other operating systems, how does sysadmin-oriented support help a corporate developer? When you are trying to get your project done, your support needs are around the design and code, not how to get printing working.
Last year, in June of 2006, Red Hat made a very definitive move that told the rest of the world we are more than “just Linux.” We brought JBoss into the fold, the world’s leading open source middleware company. Along with JBoss comes a renewed focus on the developer and a large body of experienced, professional open source support people who know how to take care of developers.
This is a natural progression, in terms of our customer needs. When sysadmin support was the main need, Red Hat fulfilled it. When a longer-life-cycle OS was needed, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was born. As our customers ask for more support in different areas, that is the next path Red Hat treads. Customers asked Red Hat to move up the stack, and JBoss is a very strong move in that direction.
In the time since, Red Hat/JBoss have come out with new bundlings, such as the combined Application Stack (JEE + LAMP on Red Hat Enterprise Linux under one subscription) and a first, global offering of developer support.
Currently out in beta, and due for release a little later this year, is the Red Hat Developer Studio, an Eclipse-based IDE directly from the active open source projects at JBoss.org. It includes new open source technologies from Exadel, JBoss Ajax4JSF and JBoss RichFaces. The developer support for the resultant JAR is for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows. Very different from “just Linux.”
We now have enough foundation to justify building a developer portal. We’ve created Dev Fu to provide updated and relevant master-level content for developers trying to get their work done.
We are focusing on technologies that are mainly specific to Red Hat/JBoss subscription offerings. In addition to the new content we are providing, Dev Fu is gathering the best voices and commentary from inside and outside of Red Hat/JBoss, to draw your attention to this relevant material.
After that, Dev Fu is following the successful Red Hat model — build out and up based on the needs of our customers, the corporate developers.