As one of the leading Linux vendors, Red Hat Inc. offers a variety of operating systems for its multitude of customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the company’s main offering, an ultra stable workhorse OS for businesses. Then there’s the Fedora Linux distribution, targeted at developers who want the latest and greatest development tools.

But what if you would prefer a bit of both? That’s where the Red Hat Developer Toolset 6 comes in.

Red Hat’s Developer Toolset has just been updated to provide developers with the latest and greatest development tools. The idea behind Toolset is simple. Available to Red Hat Developer Program members only, it provides access to the latest stable open source C and C++ compilers and complementary development and performance profiling tools, thereby helping to streamline their application development.

Using the Developer Toolset, devs can create apps once and deploy them across multiple versions of Red Hat’s operating system RHEL. These include RHEL on x86 systems (Intel and AMD); RHEL for Power (IBM’s processor); RHEL for z Systems; and RHEL Server for ARM Developer Preview.

In addition, Red Hat also announced the general availability of Red Hat Software Collections 2.3. These are a set of open-source web development tools, databases and dynamic languages, which the company says are designed as a balance between production stability and developer agility.

The new collection comes with a bunch of new software tools, such as the latest versions of open-source databases MySQL 5.7 and Redis 3.2. Other new additions include Perl 5.25 and PHP 7.0, which are both dynamic open-source languages; Git 2.9, which is the latest stable release of the open-source software version control system; Thermostat 1.6, a Java Virtual Machine monitoring tools, and Eclipse Neon (4.6.1), which is the latest stable release of the Eclipse integrated development environment. Existing software collections have also been updated, including PHP 5.6, Python 3.5, Ruby 2.3 and MongoDB 3.2.

Red Hat said that many of new collections have been made available as Docker-formatted images or Docker containers, which are available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

“To help achieve the benefits promised by modern applications, development methods should include newer, innovative tools, but not at the cost of enterprise IT stability,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Platforms business unit. “Red Hat Red Hat Software Collections is designed to pair the innovation needed for modern application development, including the creation of cloud-native applications, with the stability required by mission-critical systems, backed by Red Hat’s enterprise-grade support and integrated with our robust product portfolio.”

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