Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Red Hat Developer Monthly Newsletter

If you're reading this, you probably already know that Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing Linux, cloud, virtualization, storage, and middleware technologies. The key components of the community approach are developers— whether they're building open source components for consumption, or building applications using these technologies.

We're dedicating this newsletter to those of you who are designing and developing great applications based on Red Hat technologies. The goal of this newsletter is pretty straightforward: to inform, engage and excite our developer community with up-to-date information, best practices, opinion, product, and program announcements, as well as pointers to sample code and other great resources to help you build amazing solutions.

In the coming months, we'll be touching on subjects like platform-as-a-service, JBoss, DevOps, programming languages, architectural guidance, and much more.

If you have an questions or requests for topics, reply to this email.

Welcome, and happy coding!

From,

The Red Hat Developer Relations Team

Featured Article - December, 2013

Red Hat IT begins its DevOps journey.

The feature article of the month, Red Hat Begins its DevOps Journey, is by Bill Montgomery, the manager of Red Hat's own IT team, which is responsible for deploying DevOps inside of Red Hat. This is one in a series of articles by this team (internally called the Inception Team) who will be documenting their experiences of launching DevOps in Red Hat. We hope you enjoy them.

Recent News

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta announced!

Simply put, we believe Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 7 represents the future of IT. As physical servers, hypervisors, and cloud deployments converge, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 provides the foundation upon which to build next-generation IT infrastructure, regardless of the specific deployment environment. No other operating system on the market today offers the flexibility and stability needed to manage the emerging IT world.

Based on Fedora 19 and the Linux 3.9 kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will provide users with powerful new capabilities that streamline and automate installation and deployment, simplify management, and enhance ease-of-use, all while delivering unprecedented stability. Several key new and enhanced developer-related features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta include:

• Some really cool Systemd capabilities in the underlying operating system
• Standardized and interesting access to the OS internals via OpenLMI capabilities
• Application tuning and analysis tools to help you get your applications to production faster and with more confidence
• Physical and hosted in-place upgrades
• And more, particularly for developers, in the blog post

Learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta.

OpenShift Online announces 50% lower gear prices, more countries, and 2GB gears

In the last year, OpenShift Online has experienced significant momentum, growing its user base by 259% and its application count by 322%, year-over-year with increased adoption across all major supported technology stacks. Read about it here.

Some recent blog articles

Continuous Integration Strategies (Langdon White, Red Hat)

Continuous integration (CI) facilitates the early detection and eradication of software defects—defects that may otherwise go undetected for days, weeks, or months after they were created. Learn about open source recommended practices for CI strategies in this 3-part article.

Extending software collections with additional packages (Doran Barton, Bluehost)

You may have heard of Red Hat Software Collections, what they're good for, and how you can tke advantage of them to easily enhance your development environment using the latest and greatest versions of your favorite programming languages and relational back-end databases. But they may not have every package you need. This article explains how to easily create your own software collection to add what you need.

30 technologies in 30 days (Shekhar Gulati, Red Hat)

Shekhar Gulati took on the challenge of learning 30 new technologies in 30 days and blogging about each day. He hasn't missed a day. His goal is to get familiar with many of the new technologies being used in the developer community and how each one can work on OpenShift by Red Hat. See the list of all the technologies he's learned so far.

Red Hat Developer Toolset 2.0 – a Tour of Features and OpenShift Integration (Matt Newsome, Red Hat)

Matt, Red Hat engineering manager, talks about (including a 5.5-minute demo video) some of the great new features in Red Hat Developer Toolset, including the option to create and deploy your C++ application to OpenShift from right within the Eclipse IDE. In addition to the headline features of Eclipse 4.3 (Kepler), gcc 4.8, Dyninst 8.0, and Strace 4.7, Red Hat Developer Toolset continues to enable C, C++, and Fortran developers to compile once and then deploy across multiple versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (i.e., compile on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, deploy on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6).

WildFly Dockerfiles (Harald Pehl)

Learn how to setup both a WildFly standalone server and a domain with multiple hosts and servers using Docker.

Webinar: Technical intro to Red Hat Software Collections (Bohuslav "Slavek" Kabrda, Red Hat)

Now that Red Hat Software Collections is generally available, here is a no-cost technical webinar to learn about them. This will be the first in a series of technical webinars, with many or most being related to Red Hat Software Collections.

Popular articles on Red Hat Developer Blog

Setting up Django and Python 2.7 Red Hat Enterprise 6 the easy way (Langdon White, Red Hat)

Recently, Langdon needed to get Django installed with Python 2.7 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. As you might imagine, the expected method for installation would be to grab the Python 2.7 source tree and then build it. Obviously, that can be a lot of work; is not particularly repeatable; and, potentially, exposes you to more security flaws. Read how Langdon did it.

Ruby on Rails 3.2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with Software Collections (Bohuslav "Slavek" Kabrda, Red Hat)

Red Hat Software Collections (often abbreviated as SCL) allows you to run more recent versions of software than what ships with your current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This article will show you how to start development of a Rails 3.2 application running on Ruby 1.9.3—all on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, using only RPM packages, alongside your default Ruby installation.

Released! Red Hat Software Collections now GA! (Mike Guerette, Red Hat)

Red Hat Software Collections are the new and popular way to get the latest stable versions of languages (Ruby 1.9.3 with Rails 3.2, Python 2.7 and 3.3, PHP 5.4, Perl 5.16.3, and in Tech Preview, Node.js 0.10), and open source databases (MariaDB 5.5, MySQL 5.5, PostgreSQL 9.2) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Learn about them here.

Follow these developer blogs

If you're not aware of it, Red Hat has a new developer blog. Be sure to visit it often to get the latest technical scoops on all sorts of developer related topics. If you'd like to follow more focused blogs, see these 2 popular ones for JBoss and OpenShift. If you want to add to your SysAdmin chops, we also have a new blog targeted to "sys admin'ing all the things" at rhelblog.redhat.com.

Upcoming Events

JBoss events can be found here.

• JUDCon2014:India - Bangalore, India, January 30-31, 2014The previous JUDCon events held in January of 2012 and 2013 in India were a great success, and are still the world's biggest JUDCons to-date. Join us this year for great new JBoss talks and a new venue.

OpenShift events can be found here.

Product information

Product information can be found on the new Red Hat Developer Blog.

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