From Portals to the Cloud: Extending the eXo-Red Hat Partnership

Almost two years ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat, with the goal of building the best open source portal framework ever: GateIn. Today we announced that we’re extending this partnership by offering an easy way to develop apps for OpenShift, Red Hat’s new Platform-as-a-Service offering. Before I dive into the details of how eXo Cloud IDE will work with OpenShift, I’ll quickly recap what we’ve done with Red Hat to date.

To put it simply, GateIn is the foundation for both eXo and Red Hat enterprise offerings. For Red Hat, this product is JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5 (EPP). We also use it as the core runtime for our own user experience platform, eXo Platform 3. Here’s a simple visual of this:

Our partnership reached another important milestone at the end of 2010, when Red Hat announced Site Publisher, an extension for EPP that is powered by eXo’s WCM technology. With EPP-SP, Red Hat customers can create and manage websites on top of the EPP portal.

Site Publisher is ideal for building sites that need to mix content and transactional applications that integrate well with customer’s IT environment. In many cases these are customer-facing portals, which are typically strategic projects for our common customers.

The natural next step was introducing eXo Platform 3.0 for EPP-SP. This adds a large set of user experience features like document management, workflow, communication and collaboration tools, to enterprise social networks. It also includes the same IDE as our now-famous eXo Cloud IDE. This is the full stack:

We recommend this complete stack to customers already using Red Hat technology, since everything has been tested and certified together, from the JBoss EAP application server to the RHEL Operating System!

I’m excited to share that today we are again expanding our collaboration with Red Hat, going beyond portals to the Cloud.

Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS announcement sends a strong message that the company is serious about becoming a leader in the PaaS market. They have the vision and already a great partner ecosystem. I’m really excited that eXo can be one of the first to integrate with this new public Cloud offering.

Earlier this year, we announced our own cloud strategy. Part of this will be offering several free online services for PaaS developers. eXo Cloud IDE, which is already available, is an online development environment (IDE) that developers can use to create applications in the cloud (collaborating with up to 5 other developers in their dedicated domain), then deploy to the PaaS of their choice.

Today, we announce the native integration of eXo Cloud IDE and Red Hat OpenShift. A developer in eXo Cloud IDE can create a Ruby application and easily deploy it to OpenShift.

The integration is made possible by Git, which is now supported by both the eXo Cloud IDE and OpenShift. A simple push of the application source code from the IDE will trigger the automatic (re)deployment of the application in the PaaS. This push action can be used both during the development phase as a “test as you code” tool (where you need a quick visual result on your changes) and to do production deployment.

Working with the cloud team at Red Hat has been a really rewarding experience, just as it has been collaborating with the JBoss team around GateIn. The people are open, talented and hard-working, and seem to genuinely care about their partners. I look forward to collaborating around OpenShift, and to seeing what other great things our partnership will bring in the future.

Brahim Jaouane

I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.