Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.1, Red Hat’s newest installment of the latest, stable open source web development tools, dynamic languages and databases. Delivered on a separate lifecycle from Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a more frequent release cadence, Red Hat Software Collections bridges developer agility and production stability by helping to accelerate the creation of modern applications that can then be more confidently deployed into production.

Also generally available today is Red Hat Developer Toolset 4, which helps to streamline application development on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by giving developers access to the latest, stable open source C and C++ compilers and complementary development and performance profiling tools. Accessible through the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Program and related subscriptions, Red Hat Developer Toolset helps enable developers to compile applications once and deploy across multiple versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Software Collections 2.1 features several new and updated collections, including:

  • Varnish Cache 4.0.3, a caching HTTP reverse proxy that is able to help accelerate web applications
  • nginx 1.8, an updated version of the popular HTTP and reverse proxy server
  • node.js 0.10.40, an updated version of the runtime environment for developing server-side web applications
  • Updated Maven 3.0 collection with additional packages

New additions and updated components of Red Hat Developer Toolset 4 include:

  • GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 5.2
  • The GNU Project Debugger (GDB) 7.10
  • Eclipse Mars (4.5)
  • Many updates to toolchain components and performance tools, such as binutils (2.25) and SystemTap (2.8)

For developers looking to take advantage of the rapid development and deployment cycles inherent to Linux containers, many of the popular Red Hat Software Collections have been made available as Dockerfiles. In addition, many of the popular Red Hat Software Collections are also now available as docker-formatted container images via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Applications built with Red Hat Software Collections can be deployed into production with greater confidence, as most software collections and components are supported for three years. In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7, applications built with Red Hat Software Collections can also be deployed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host and OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, giving more choice and flexibility for application portfolios.