Well, it took a lot longer than we initially anticipated, but I'm really pleased to say that the Spring Dynamic Modules project reached its 1.0 milestone today. When I first posted on this topic back in September of 2006 ("Spring OSGi support gaining momentum") the initial specification was just an attachment to an issue against the Spring Framework, and connections to the wider OSGi community were only just beginning to be formed. Fast forward eighteen months, and Spring Dynamic Modules has become a full-fledged project in the Spring portfolio with committers from SpringSource, BEA, and…

We recently hosted a webinar on the theme of "Spring in Production." I promised then to make the recording of the webinar and accompanying slides available on our website. Unfortunately the engineers producing the webinar for us forgot to set the 'record' flag, so I need to re-record the session for you :(. I'm traveling at the moment but I'll try to do that and make it available as soon as I can. The good news is that there's no need for you to miss out in the meantime. I wrote a white paper on the topic of "Spring in Production" that covers the material from the webinar and more besides…

You may have seen some of the recent press surrounding the announcement that Interface21 is partnering with Tasktop to create a "Spring Tool Suite". This suite will bring together Spring IDE, the AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT), AspectJ, and Mylyn to create a task-focused approach to the development of Spring-powered enterprise applications. We hope to have a preview of the integrated suite available to share with you at the forthcoming The Spring Experience conference, but in the meantime you'll see many of the improvements flowing into the existing Spring IDE, AJDT, AspectJ, and Mylyn open…

Yesterday GigaSpaces announced the latest release of their Space-Based Architecture, and it's got a new name to go with it too: the GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP). To quote from their press release: Announcements like this are part of a virtuous circle (described for example by Geoffrey Moore in his book "The Gorilla Game") whereby the pervasiveness of the Spring Framework makes it very compelling for vendors to provide Spring Framework integration in their products, which in turn increases the overall value of Spring. This of course helps to make Spring even more pervasive…

Late last year we started talking about the notion of a Spring "release train". The idea behind the release train is that we put out co-ordinated releases of the products in the Spring Portfolio: tested together and working together. You can still pick and choose the pieces you need, but it will be easier to use the various products together when you want to. We're not there yet, but we're on our way. One of the struggles for us at Interface21 has been that the demand for our support services, training, and consultancy has been so high that we've been working everyone flat out to try and meet…

No, that's not my headline, it's actually the title of a white paper recently published by Open SOA collaboration. To quote from the news announcement accompanying the whitepaper: The white paper provides a short overview of SCA, OSGi and Spring, and then describes how they can be used together. Quoting from the summary: Simplicity, flexibility, manageability, testability, reusability. A key combination for enterprise developers." I'll be co-presenting on SCA and Spring with Mike Edwards of IBM at the JavaOne conference next week: session TS-8194, "Spring and Service Component Architecture as…

It started out as a small thing. Just a hunch of mine that Spring and OSGi should sit together very well. The idea was that by enabling Spring applications to be deployed in an OSGi runtime, we could bring better modularity, versioning, runtime deployment and update capabilities to Spring applications. It's a project I never really advertised; I just started experimenting, talking to a few people, and writing some early prototype code. It turns out that a lot of people seem to be interested in Spring and OSGi. We have a collaboration ongoing with representatives from BEA, Oracle, IBM, Eclipse…

An article I wrote for the InfoQ site has just gone live: Simplifying Enterprise Applications With Spring 2.0 and AspectJ. I've heard a number of people saying that "AOP is too hard", or "AOP makes things too complex". In a way this article was written as a rebuttal of those views (hence the title, "Simplifying Enterprise Application Development"). I mean, the whole point of AOP is that you take software that was getting complex and tangled up, and you simplify the implementation by giving each module a single responsiblity again by introducing aspects. And then of course for some…