RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat, provider of open source solutions has announced that the company has signed the Google Contributor Agreement.

The agreement brings Red Hat’s developer and production support to Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as well as support for JBoss, the global leader in open source middleware software.

The mission of Google Web Toolkit is to radically improve the web experience for users by enabling developers to use existing Java tools to build no-compromise AJAX for any modern browser. GWT has emerged as a popular Java software development platform for developers creating sophisticated, high performing web applications, as it provides a rich experience that traditional UI technologies for Java EE cannot deliver.

In addition to signing the Contributor Agreement, Red Hat announced that the company has completed some preliminary integration with GWT and the JBoss Seam Framework. Through the integration, Red Hat is leveraging Seam’s open and pluggable architecture so that developers can easily combine the power of enterprise Java with the modern view-layer technologies like GWT, RichFaces and Spring to develop Rich Internet Applications.

“The flexibility and open architecture of JBoss Seam 2.0 made this integration with Google Web Toolkit and partnership with Google possible,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat’s JBoss middleware business. “By partnering with Google, JBoss is demonstrating our commitment to fostering developer choice. We believe developers should be able to select technology such as GWT, Spring Framework and Adobe Flex while using JBoss to provide the best operational and most flexible platform for running their applications.”

The announcement continues Red Hat’s history of partnership with Google on a number of initiatives. Most recently, Google selected a combined group from the Fedora Project and JBoss.org Community as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008, a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for open source projects.

"We're extremely happy to be working with Red Hat to ensure that developers can easily work with Google Web Toolkit and the JBoss Seam Framework," says Bruce Johnson, Google engineering manager and co-creator of Google Web Toolkit. "We want developers to easily use Google developer products with their favorite Java programming tools, and this is yet another step in that direction."

In the coming months, Red Hat will provide support for Google Web Toolkit as part of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription.