Ingres and Red Hat have teamed up to produce an open source software stack for developers who want to use JBoss Studio development tools to build an application that requires a transaction processing database.

The integrated stack, which resembles the LAMP stack but substitutes transaction processing Ingres for Web page-serving MySQL, will be made available sometime in February, said Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres Corp., the company behind open source Ingres. In addition, the Red Hat/Ingres stack is focused on Java developers, while LAMP tends to be used with the Web scripting languages Perl, Python, or PHP.

Burkhardt referred to the hitherto unannounced developer open source stack in a blog posted Jan. 5 by Sandhill.com, an online publication of the Sand Hill Group, software conference organizers. Instead of viewing LAMP as the competition, Burkhardt suggested the competing stack will come from Sun Microsystems with its MySQL database, Solaris 10 enterprise operating system, and Java System Application Server.

"A Red Hat, JBoss, and Ingres stack will be available for Java application developers, and a competing Sun stack, including MySQL, will be offered to existing Sun and MySQL customers," he predicted in the blog.

MySQL is often used for Web applications. It's less frequently used as a transaction processing database, while Ingres was built to serve that purpose in production systems, said Burkhardt. His firm has been the company behind Ingres since 2005, after it was launched as open source code by CA.

Red Hat and Ingres are jointly working on integrating JBoss Developer Studio tools with Ingres so developers won't stumble over the lack of tools as they start to build a Java online transaction processing application. "We haven't had a fully customizable stack able to use JBoss tools," Burkhardt acknowledged.

JBoss Developer Studio includes a set of plug-ins for the open source Eclipse programmer's workbench, used by many Java developers. They include the JBoss Visual Editor for editing code, JBoss RichFaces for building user interface components with Ajax, and JBoss Seam, a framework with wizards and other automated assists for supplying the underlying plumbing of a Java application. These tools will be able to produce code that works with Ingres upon installation on a developer's workstation.

In February, Red Hat and Ingres will make available "a software bundle that installs the Ingres database, JBoss Application Server, and JBoss tool suite as components preconfigured to work together," Emma McGrattan, senior VP of engineering at Ingres, said in an interview. "Developers won't need to set their own parameters."

Over the last two years, Ingres and Red Hat have quietly worked together on a production software stack of open source components, including the Apache Web Server, JBoss Application Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ingres. The upcoming developer stack will make it easier to build applications for the production suite.