Ingres bundles Red Hat for app development stack

IDG News Service - Ingres on Wednesday announced the Ingres Development Stack for JBoss, a bundle that combines Ingres' open-source database with Red Hat's JBoss Developer Studio and Enterprise Application Platform.

The bundle's components have been preconfigured, so developers can begin working on applications quickly, Ingres said. A number of sample applications are included to aid programmers.

Users can download a 90-day evaluation version of the bundle from Ingres' Web site. Downloads are available for Windows 32-bit and Linux 32-bit systems.

Ingres is hoping that developers like the bundle enough to start putting applications into production, said Deb Woods, vice president of product management. At that point, Red Hat and Ingres could start making money selling production support. The companies also plan to offer developer support services as well, according to Woods.

Wednesday's announcement is just the latest outcome of Ingres and Red Hat's existing partnership, and also ties into a general move by open-source vendors to form partnerships. Both companies, as well as the large IT distributor SYNNEX, are part of the recently formed Open Source Channel Alliance.

As for the new application development stack, it's likely aimed at a couple of competitive targets, according to Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond.

"I think they are looking to compete with the LAMP stacks that you see are part of many Linux distros at the low end, and at the high end they are looking to offer a simple development alternative to the 'Red Stack' (Oracle) and the "Blue Stack' (IBM)," he said via e-mail.

"As the big get bigger, there's a gap opening up in the Java market in the middle, where developers simply want lean frameworks and tools that support servlets and [JavaServer Pages] and not much else," Hammond added. "It's where we see a lot of Spring usage, but also JBoss as well."