The two companies will offer Eclipse-based developer tools for building applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat and Exadel said.

"If you take a look at where Red Hat's business was a couple years ago, it was primarily around migration of production systems to Enterprise Linux," said Brian Che, Red Hat product manager. But now, Red Hat wants developers to build new applications, Che said. This week's announcement follows last year's as part of Red Hat's strategy.

Through an arrangement being announced at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, Exadel will open source all of its products, including the Exadel Studio Pro Web development environment and the RichFaces AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components platform. Exadel Studio Pro, which is based on the Eclipse platform, will be renamed Red Hat Developer Studio.

Also, Exadel's Ajax4jsf, which is a framework for JavaServer Faces applications that use AJAX, will be consolidated under the JBoss.org umbrella. Red Hat will work with Exadel to drive development of these projects and integrate them with JBoss middleware technologies such as the application framework.

In offering its products via open source, Exadel is seeking to increase awareness of its technologies and sell application-building services around them. "We believe that this gives us more visibility," said Donna Burke, Exadel vice president. Red Hat, meanwhile, will support the products itself.