Red Hat adds app lifecycle tools to PaaS preview

Red Hat has outfitted its OpenShift hosted application platform with a set of application development lifecycle tools to simplify deployment on the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), the company announced Tuesday.

"OpenShift has a fully integrated development workflow," said Issac Roth, Red Hat PaaS master. "You could code on an iPad now, because you are not doing any compilation locally and not doing any of the runtime locally."

OpenShift now includes the open source Maven and Jenkins application development management programs, and is also now fully integrated with Red Hat's JBoss Tools IDE (Integrated Developer Environment).

Launched in May, OpenShift is Red Hat's PaaS offering, which, once it is commercially available, will provide a scalable hosted environment for individuals and organizations to run their applications. OpenShift can run programs written in Java, PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby. It also provides a variety of databases and caching layer tools, as well as the Red Hat JBoss application server.

With OpenShift, "the developer can focus on the application, not the stack. They don't have to worry about maintaining all the infrastructure and middleware," Roth said.

The addition of the development lifecycle tools should ease the process of deploying a program in OpenShift, Roth said. The integration with JBoss Tools will allow developers to write code on their own machines and then compile and run their programs on OpenShift. Jenkins, an open source continuous integration server, will automatically integrate code changes from developers into the master copy on OpenShift.

The inclusion of Maven should streamline the way developers manage their application's dependencies, or the other programs and libraries that the developer's program needs to operate. Before Maven was incorporated, developers would have to keep copies of all these needed resources on their own, and upload them with their applications. OpenShift now offers a wide range of open source libraries, and will allow developers to add their own.

Red Hat has not started charging for OpenShift yet, and is allowing developers and organizations run their programs on the service at no cost. Once it sets up billing and support, Red Hat will start commercially offering the service, sometime in 2012, Roth said.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com