INTRODUCTION
Easy access to advancements in runtime technologies leads to more innovative applications. Red Hat® Software Collections delivers the latest stable versions of dynamic languages, open source databases, and web development tools that can be deployed alongside those included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. Red Hat Software Collections is available with select Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions and has a three-year life cycle to allow rapid innovation without sacrificing stability.
Some applications require more recent versions of software components to make use of new functionality. Red Hat Software Collections provides dynamic programming languages, database servers, and related packages that are either more recent than those included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or are being made available for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the first time.
Red Hat uses software collections functionality to deliver Red Hat Software Collections. Software collections functionality, not to be confused with Red Hat Software Collections, provides a structural definition, independent of the operating system, for applications or tools. This allows you to build and concurrently install multiple versions of the same software components on your system. Packages built using software collections technology do not overwrite system files and can depend on other software collections.
Red Hat Software Collections is a prescribed set of content intended for use in Red Hat Enterprise Linux production environments. Red Hat Software Collections lets you choose the runtime versions best suited for your projects, preserve application stability, and deploy your applications with confidence.
CHOOSE THE BEST RUNTIMES FOR YOUR PROJECTS
Red Hat makes stable tools and runtime technologies available for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux under its 10-year life cycle. Red Hat Software Collections augments this with access to recent, stable versions of essential web development tools, dynamic languages, open source databases, C and C++ compilers, the Eclipse IDE, and a variety of development and performance management tools.
By adopting Red Hat Software Collections, developers can take advantage of innovation with the latest stable versions of Ruby and Rails, PHP, Python, MySQL, and more—without the effort and risk associated with installing and troubleshooting unsupported community versions. The packages included in Red Hat Software Collections are suited for projects with shorter application life cycles. Applications with life cycles greater than five years can benefit from the packages that are included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
PRESERVE APPLICATION STABILITY
Components in Red Hat Software Collections are packaged so that they can be installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and run concurrently alongside existing versions without overwriting system files. Red Hat Software Collections does not replace the components that ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This means that you can preserve stability as you deploy applications built on newer versions of Python, Ruby, and other runtime languages. The same is true of the included open source databases and other essential development tools.
