The product in question is Exadel Studio Pro, the IDE at the center of its offerings for development of rich web front ends. JBoss announced that it has finished adapting the code and licensing model.
Back in March at the EclipseCon conference, JBoss announced the unusual arrangement with Exadel, whose prime business is developing Java applications, and the tools that happened to be an offshoot of its business. Under the agreement, Exadel continued to own the tooling and underling technology, but entrusted JBoss to develop and make it available under an open source model.
Both would be made available as Eclipse plug-ins, but made available not through the Eclipse developer portal, but JBoss’s counterpart. The Exadel technologies were to be used by JBoss to building up its own tooling stack that would also incorporate its appserver; the Hibernate persistence framework; SEAM, a component integration layer; and a copy of red Hat Enterprise Linux.
That of course goes against the normal model where Red Hat/JBoss would have just simply bought the technology from Exadel outright. In this case, the party line is that Exadel viewed the tooling as promoting its core development competency and would therefore provide a halo effect. Or one could argue that JBoss didn’t offer enough money.
Besides Exadel Studio pro, which is the IDE for developing components for rich web applications, the other piece was RichFaces, a JSF component library for generating Ajax-style user interfaces. RichFaces was turned over to JBoss which open sourced it when the announcement was made last March.
Back in March, JBoss said that Studio Pro would be available by summer, so this week’s announcement shows that they are meeting their original schedule.
Like the rest of the JBoss tools stack, Exadel Studio Pro will be made available through the Eclipse Public License (EPL), but only through its own portal, and not Eclipse.
