Red Hat will compete with Spikesource and SourceLabs, who are in the business of validating, integrating, productizing, certifying and supporting LAMP stacks, by early 2006 with three certified open source software stacks through the Red Hat Network that are production-supported.
Each stack will be certified and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and delivered in a subscription model. Pricing will start at $599 per server.
The company said the stacks would simplify and standardize open source application stacks and developers could focus on their applications instead of configuring the underlying platform. It mumbled something about improving time-to-market for customers' development projects by helping reduce the certification and testing burden.
There will be a Red Hat Web Application Stack, a Red Hat Java Web Application Stack and a Red Hat Enterprise Java Stack.
Red Hat says the Web Application Stack is for simple web sites and applications, and includes the key LAMP components Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database and the PHP scripting language on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Customers will be able to choose the PostgreSQL database, which will be an option with the Web Application Stack.
It says the Java Web Application Stack is for more dynamic web
applications and supports all the components of the Web Application
Stack - in other words LAMP plus PostgreSQL - as well as the Apache
Tomcat servlet and JSP Container. There will be support and updates for
the key Java development libraries and tools - Apache Struts, Apache
Axis, Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, Ant, Junit, Jython, Log4J and key XML
libraries.
The Red Hat Enterprise Java Stack will have all the
components of the Java Web Application Stack plus support for a full
Java application server based on ObjectWeb's J2EE-certified JOnAS
project, which is already available as Red Hat Application Server. Like
the Java Web Application Stack, it will support key Java development
libraries as well as MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Red Hat says each of
the stacks will include free access to Red Hat's Eclipse-based
Developer Suite, and be available as a layered subscription on top of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
(The original version of this story appeared at
www.clientservernews.com.)