SpringSource announced yesterday a new product the SpringSource Application Platform which is simply said a J2EE server à
From a technical point of view I am very pleased about this new product, because I believe in OSGI and its benefits. I'm working on IBM Websphere 6.1 which is also based on OSGI but without giving the opportunity to access the target runtime from the application level, a feature that could simplify considerably the management (versioning, deployment, patching ...) and the non-web modules of the application like batches. This is not only the case of Websphere but all actual implementations of J2EE application servers choose this approach.
But, from another point of view, I want to reply to a question that asked an interviewer to Rod Johnson about the unusual discretion about the announcement of this new SpringSource product.
I think that the days when Spring was an implementation of some great ideas of Rod that he published in his two famous books Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development and J2EE without EJB and evolved only by the needs and the critics of its community and those when the framework is becoming a platform with a company like the SpringSource behind it with important economic issues there is a big gap. And like any other company SpringSource will not be driven by the simple needs and ideas of his customers but principally by a commercial model. And so all the romantics and the effervescence of the Spring community must give way to commercial and economic models. I hope that I am wrong but I think that we are in the same scenario of Hibernate/Gavin King/JBoss.
