Monday, December 10, 2007

We're not going to release Red Hat Developer Studio anymore. Introducing JBoss Developer Studio 1.0!

I'm pleased to announce today the General Availability of JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 for Windows and Linux. JBoss Developer Studio provides a certified open source development environment that includes and integrates:

JBoss Developer Studio provides a host of powerful features, such as Seam tools, powerful Ajax capabilities, a Visual Page Editor with WYSIWYG editing of JSF pages and RichFaces Ajax components, robust Hibernate capabilities, and much more.

One of the main benefits of using JBoss Developer Studio is that it pre-integrates and certifies tooling and runtime components together. When you use JBoss Developer Studio:
  • You don't have to worry about whether all the plugins you use will work together or require incompatible dependencies.
  • You'll have the assurance that all your runtime libraries like Hibernate or Seam are properly matched with each other and already installed into JBoss Application Server.
  • You'll know that the particular Eclipse plugins you have work precisely with the runtime libraries and containers in your development environment.
  • You can easily upgrade to new technologies because all the matching tooling, runtime components, and dependencies will be provided to you in an integrated installer.
  • You can deploy your development platform with confidence because Red Hat supports JBoss Enterprise Application Platform releases for 5 years.
In addition to Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Developer Studio also includes a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network access for development use. Even if you're a Windows-based developer (and we know that a lot of you are!), you may want to take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in virtualization capabilities to run multiple Windows guests for different development and test environments.

Many of you know that we had released a couple betas under the name, Red Hat Developer Studio. During the beta process, we found that it would be advantageous to leverage the powerful JBoss brand more clearly. So, as we release this new offering, we are officially christening it JBoss Developer Studio.

JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 is available now as a subscription offering for $99. To summarize, JBoss Developer Studio includes:
  • Eclipse
  • Eclipse Tooling
  • JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • RHN Access
  • Support for Windows and Linux

To learn more about JBoss Developer Studio, visit: http://www.jboss.com/products/devstudio

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Red Hat Enterprise MRG: Red Hat, Customer-Driven Innovation, and Open Source Leadership

Red Hat has shown that open source is one of the best ways to bring customer-driven innovation and leadership to the market. Today’s announcement of Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides a perfect example of this in many respects.

Spreading the Message of Open Source and Open Standards

Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes Red Hat’s implementation of AMQP-based ( Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) enterprise messaging. Both the MRG Messaging implementation and AMQP itself highlight Red Hat’s leadership and customer-driven innovation.

Red Hat is developing its AMQP messaging implementation in various open source projects and communities. One of the most notable aspects of these communities is that there are many messaging users from financial services and other industries contributing major pieces of code. These users are working to make sure that this messaging implementation will meet their specific needs when they ultimately consume it as customers. The results of this collaboration are noteworthy: MRG Messaging provides breakthrough features and performance and can reach durable messaging throughputs two orders of magnitude higher than other solutions.

Open source developers are not alone in recognizing the value of collaborating with others. The AMQP working group, of which Red Hat is a founding member, is developing the AMQP specification to be an open, interoperable standard for messaging. This particular working group is especially effective because its membership contains not only technology companies but also many end-users of messaging technology—including several investment banking giants. Of course, all contributions in the AMQP working group are valuable, no matter who provides them. But, AMQP is developing into a broadly accepted standard in many ways because there are so many end-users working to ensure that AMQP meets their own needs. Truly, this is customer-driven innovation.

Deterministic Success

In 2005, Red Hat began working on its realtime kernel technology in response to a request by the US Navy for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer project. Red Hat engineer, Ingo Molnar, developed a realtime patch set which brought highly deterministic response times to the Linux kernel. However, Red Hat did not just release a product around this work. Instead, Red Hat has been working and continues to work with the Linux community to bring this realtime technology into the upstream Linux kernel. To date, Red Hat has incorporated about two-thirds of its realtime code base upstream and is working to push the rest of this code upstream. One notable recent achievement was the acceptance of Ingo’s Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) into the mainline kernel this summer.

Why is Red Hat working so hard to push its realtime work into the mainline kernel? By having features implemented upstream, these capabilities “carry forward” into future versions of the kernel, so MRG Realtime has the product longevity that proprietary realtime extensions do not.

Trying to support extensions to Linux that are not accepted upstream is a losing battle. Red Hat recognized this long ago and thus pursued the long task of writing realtime extensions and pushing them upstream. Sure, this is hard work. But, at the end of the day, Red Hat will be in an optimal position to support this technology for the long term, since Red Hat wrote and led the work upstream.

Broad-Scale Innovation

Red Hat Enterprise MRG’s High Throughput Computing and grid capabilities are based on the Condor project created by and hosted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. First developed in the late 1980’s, Condor has been under continuous active research and use and possess features and capabilities that far exceed those of any commercial, proprietary grid product. However, Condor has not seen significant industry usage to date because it does not provide all the enterprise features, manageability and supportability that customers require. For example, one of the first pieces of work Red Hat performed on Condor was to break it up from one large, statically linked program into separate RPM packages that are robust, manageable, upgradeable and can be discreetly patched.

Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin have signed a unique partnership around Condor. Under this agreement, the University of Wisconsin will release Condor’s source code under an OSI-approved open source license so that Red Hat may include Condor in its open source distributions, and Red Hat will jointly fund and staff Condor development on-campus at the University of Wisconsin.

Condor has a large community of users and researchers in the academic space. Through its agreement with the University of Wisconsin, Red Hat will be able to bring this innovation from academia to the enterprise. Furthermore, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin will work to strengthen Condor with additional features and enterprise strength and also enhance Linux for High Throughput Computing to the benefit of both scientists and enterprises. Red Hat believes that this will lead to great advances in infrastructure technology and a great partnership between industry and academia. This is the best kind of customer-driven, open source innovation of all: one that not only advances technology but improves the way we do things.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise MRG, see here.

Monday, December 3, 2007

How to get smaller-looking fonts on Fedora 8

When I installed Fedora 8, I thought it was quite slick and impressive visually in many ways. But, there was one thing that bugged me--my fonts now looked much bigger than they did in Fedora 7. It turns out that a default install of Fedora 8 sets a high dpi for fonts. To change this and get back to smaller-looking fonts:

  • Go to System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance to open the Appearances dialog box
  • Click on the Fonts tab
  • Click on the Details... button
  • Change resolution to 96 dots per inch

That's it!

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Release Candidate 1 Now Available

I'm pleased to announce that Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download for both Windows and Linux. This release fixes a number of bugs we found during the betas and also adds some polish and features, like Xul Runner and a new "mini"JMX console.

You can download Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Release Candidate 1 from http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/

Please try it out and provide feedback at http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=258

We're in the home stretch now!

Friday, October 5, 2007

Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Beta 2 Now Available

I'm pleased to announce the release of our second Beta for Red Hat Developer Studio. We've fixed a number of bugs and also added many new features, including:

  • Seam hot deploy for WARs
  • Integrated TestNG so that generated Seam projects are automatically setup to be tested
  • New Seam Generate Entities Wizard
  • New Seam wizards for all the Seam component generation options from seam-gen (Seam Action, Form, Entity, Conversation)
  • And more!

You can download Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Beta 2 from http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/

Please try it out and provide feedback at http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=258

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Getting Networking on Fedora 7 Working after Suspend/Resume

After recently updating my Fedora 7 installation, I was pleasantly surprised to find that suspend/resume now works on my ThinkPad T60. However, there was one problem: after resuming out of suspend, NetworkManager wouldn't see any of my network devices and thus couldn't connect to any network.

To fix this, I hacked my system to stop NetworkManager upon suspend and then start NetworkManger on resume. You can do this by editing the file

/usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux
(/usr/lib64/...
on x86_64 machines)

Edit the section that reads:


#RedHat/Fedora and SUSE support pm-utils
elif [ -f "/etc/redhat-release" ] || [ -f "/etc/fedora-release" ] \
|| [ -f "/etc/SuSE-release" ] ; then
# TODO: fix pm-suspend to take a --wakeup-alarm argument
if [ $seconds_to_sleep != "0" ] ; then
alarm_not_supported
fi
# TODO: fixup pm-suspend to define erroc code (see alarm above) and throw
# the appropriate exception
if [ -x "/usr/sbin/pm-suspend" ] ; then
#stop network manager
service NetworkManager stop
/usr/sbin/pm-suspend $QUIRKS
RET=$?
else
# TODO: add support
unsupported
fi

by adding the red commands. This stops NetworkManager at suspend.

Then, at the bottom of the file, edit the text:


#Refresh devices as a resume can do funny things
for type in button battery ac_adapter
do
devices=`hal-find-by-capability --capability $type`
for device in $devices
do
dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal \
$device org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Rescan
done
done

#start NetworkManager
service NetworkManager start

exit $RET

by adding the text in red.

Now, when you suspend and resume Fedora 7, networking should work!

Monday, August 13, 2007

Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Beta 1 Now Available

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio. This beta release marks the first time that a 100% open source development solution is available that integrates Eclipse, Eclipse plugins, and an entire runtime platform (The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform). So, with Red Hat Developer Studio, you can, out of the box, do things like:

  • Generate a new Seam application using new Seam tools and deploy right into a pre-configured JBoss Application Server
  • Visually design and code JSF pages using the updated Visual Page Editor, which now supports WYSIWYG editing of rich, AJAX components
  • Generate entity beans for Seam applications from your database using Hibernate and visual seam-gen tools

You can download the Red Hat Developer Studio beta from http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Red Hat Messaging is now at jboss.org

I'm pleased to announce that the open source project, Red Hat Messaging, has now moved to jboss.org: http://labs.jboss.com/rhmessaging/. Red Hat Messaging is an open source project that is building a high performance, reliable distribution of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. We're excited to work on this project as part of the JBoss middleware community. We hope that you'll check out the project, try out the builds, and perhaps get involved in development!

We're also happy to be collaborating with the JBoss Messaging project. You can find out more about how JBoss Messaging and Red Hat Messaging relate by viewing the JBoss Messaging and Red Hat Messaging FAQ.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Eclipse Europa is Available

Today marks the release of Eclipse Europa, the next version of Eclipse's open source framework and components. This is a great achievement by Eclipse and a testament to the power of open source--the on-time, simultaneous, coordinated release of 21 distinct projects is a fantastic feat. Even the largest software companies have trouble releasing a couple products together.

This is why at Red Hat, we are doing all of our development for JBoss Tools in open source at jboss.org. In fact, we are already targeting Eclipse Europa with our plugins. So, if you want to try out all the latest tools for building powerful and rich applications, try downloading Eclipse Europa and then installing the latest JBoss Tools builds! And, of course, you can look forward to Red Hat Developer Studio later this summer, which will certify and integrate all this, along with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Exadel Plugins Now Available in Open Source at JBoss Tools!

Today marks an important milestone for the upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio product from Red Hat: we have completed open sourcing the former Exadel Studio Pro plugins from the Red Hat/Exadel Partnership that we announced back at EclipseCon in March.

These plugins, along with the former JBoss IDE plugins, and some new ones (e.g. a Seam plugin) are all available at the JBoss Tools project at jboss.org. You can visit the JBoss Tools project to check out the source code and download the latest versions of the plugins. And, of course, we'd welcome your participation in the open source project too.

One of the most exciting aspects of our open sourcing Exadel's plugins at jboss.org is that this marks the first time that developer tools of this caliber have been available in open source. Previously, all the major Eclipse-based tools vendors built their offerings on top of an open source foundation (Eclipse). But, they kept their most desirable features proprietary and sold them to customers. At Red Hat, we believe the best way to help developers is to provide them with a powerful and completely open source set of development tools and platforms.

For developers that want the latest versions of our plugins and like to remain at the tip of our technology, they are welcome to go to JBoss Tools and tailor-assemble their own, ideal development environment. For developers that prefer an integrated, supportable, and stable development environment that offers great technology, Red Hat has a solution too. Later this summer, Red Hat will be introducing a new product around the JBoss Tools project: Red Hat Developer Studio.

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide a subscription that includes and integrates:

  • Eclipse 3.3 from the Eclipse Europa release
  • Production-ready versions of the plugins from JBoss Tools and elsewhere, all tested and integrated together along with their dependencies into Eclipse
  • The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes production-ready versions of JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and Seam
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • Red Hat Network access for updates
Red Hat Developer Studio will provide one installer that sets up your entire development environment: Eclipse, plugins, and JBoss runtime platforms all integrated together. Of course, like all of our products, Red Hat Developer Studio will be 100% open source. And, it will run on a variety of platforms like Linux and Windows.

So, Red Hat will be offering a variety of solutions for developers. The plugins we have just open sourced at JBoss Tools will provide rich capabilities around many of the other projects at jboss.org. And, Red Hat Developer Studio will build upon JBoss Tools to offer a completely integrated and certified open source development environment. Please check out JBoss Tools and let us know what you think!

Stable Fedora 7 Wireless Networking on a Thinkpad T60

Fedora 7 includes new, free iwl3945 wireless drivers. This means that users with the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 card in their laptops (like my T60 has) no longer have to install firmware and drivers manually to get wireless working like in FC6. This is great and makes Fedora much easier to install. Unfortunately, these new drivers don't seem to be quite stable yet. So, I've gone back to the old ipw3945 wireless drivers, which have been much more stable for me. Here's how I did it:

  1. do a rpm install to get the freshrpms repo:

    rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

  2. install the ipw3945 packages:

    yum install -y ipw3945-kmdl-`uname -r` ipw3945


  3. create /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 with the contents:

    install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945 ; sleep 0.5 ; /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet
    remove ipw3945 /sbin/ipw3945d --kill ; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945

  4. add to /etc/rc.local to start ipw3945:

    # start wireless networking
    modprobe -r ipw3945; sleep 0.5; modprobe ipw3945

That's it!

Note: If you ever update your kernel to a newer version, you will have to do a

yum install -y ipw3945-kmdl-`uname -r`

to get the corresponding wireless module for your new kernel. This is one of the disadvantages of going to the old ipw3945 drivers versus the ones included in Fedora 7.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Introduction to Red Hat Developer Studio Webinar

Update:
The recording for this webinar is online at http://www.info.redhat.com/forms/RHDevStudioWebinarDownloadRequest


The upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio attracted quite a bit of attention and buzz recently at JavaOne and the Red Hat Summit. Red Hat Developer Studio will be the first completely open source, Eclipse-based development environment with robust capabilities for building rich, enterprise applications. Red Hat Developer Studio also will include the new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform so that developers will have one installer that integrates all their development tools, components, and platforms with no manual configuration necessary.

If you missed out on the live demos that we did for Red Hat Developer Studio, you can check out a webinar that we're hosting 5/31 at 2:00 PM EDT:

Introduction to Red Hat Developer Studio

This webinar will introduce Red Hat Developer Studio, a new, robust, and completely open source Eclipse-based IDE for building enterprise Rich Internet Applications. Come see how to use exciting features like new JBoss Seam wizards and tools, JBoss RichFaces editors with visual previews, and robust Hibernate tooling.

HOSTED BY: Bryan Che
SPEAKERS: James Williams: Solutions Architect, Red Hat
Max Katz: Senior Systems Engineer, Exadel
DATE: Thursday, May 31
TIME: 2 p.m. EDT

Register Here to attend the webinar

If you aren't able to attend the live webinar, we plan to record it and make it available for viewing on an on-demand basis. Hope to see you there!

Monday, May 14, 2007

Red Hat Summit Presentations

Last week, I had a whirlwind California trip and attended both the Red Hat Summit in San Diego as well as JavaOne in San Francisco. I gave a presentation on Red Hat's new developer offerings on Wednesday morning at the Summit, flew to San Francisco early Wednesday afternoon for JavaOne, and then returned Thursday morning to San Diego in time to give my 11:30am presentation on Red Hat Messaging at the Summit.

Here are PDF's of the two presentations I gave at the Red Hat Summit:

Both the Red Hat Developer Program and Red Hat Messaging are exciting new offerings that Red Hat is introducing this year. The Red Hat Developer Program just launched last month and provides new developer offerings from tools and software to services and support. It will also include the upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio IDE.

Red Hat Messaging is a new open source project that implements AMQP and will provide revolutionary new levels of openness, performance, and reliability in the messaging space.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Are the Wii Shortages a Nintendo Ploy to Sell the DS?

There have been many articles about Nintendo's Wii shortages since the Wii launched during the last Christmas season. Now, Nintendo is reporting huge sales and profits for the past few months. This reminds me of a case study I read in the book, Readings in Managerial Psychology, while taking 15.301 at MIT:

So the toy manufacturers are faced with a dilemma: how to keep sales high during the peak [Christmas] season and, at the same time, retain a healthy demand for toys in the immediately following months...The problem is in motivating postholiday spent-out parents to reach down for the price of yet another plaything for their already toy-glutted children. What could the toy companies possibly do to produce that unlikely behavior?
The author found out by interviewing someone from the toy business:

I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here's where the genius of the companies' plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they've gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those things sold out and are forced to substitute toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, 'You promised, you promised,' and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.
Two interesting things to note in the recent Wii articles:
  • Most of Nintendo's stunning profits in the recent quarter came from sales of its DS handheld (16.02 million units worldwide in the latest fiscal quarter)--not the Wii (5.84 million Wii machines worldwide in the last five months). Indeed, the DS has been the best-selling of all game systems
  • Along with its large profits, Nintendo is announcing that it is now starting to increase production of its Wii console