When Oracle acquired BEA systems, I and others noted the significance of the loss of the only independent Java middleware vendor. With Oracle's recent announcement of a price hike for their products, including WebLogic Server, this is no longer a theoretical issue. They have the oil, and they think they have existing customers over a barrel. The need for alternatives is now even more painfully clear. In fairness, Oracle's move is partly driven by the weakness of the US dollar, but the increases in WebLogic pricing are far greater than those affecting other products. Fortunately, for customers…
As an open source software provider, we think we should be open about our strategy, too. We'd like to share how we got here, where we're going and why the journey will be good for Spring, good for Spring users and good for SpringSource. It quickly became clear that others liked the ideas in that code - such as Dependency Injection and the Spring data access abstraction - and benefited from putting them into practice. I was approached by readers who requested that I publish the code and who wanted to contribute. I quickly came to see some important benefits of open source. No software gets…
It's been great to hear so much discussion on the SpringSource Application Platform, online and on the floor here at JavaOne. One of the most insightful comments is from WebSphere transaction architect Ian Robinson:Does any of this affect WebSphere? Well, nothing has changed in the core Spring framework. Regardless of what the future holds for the SpringSource Application Platform, the core Spring framework project remains complimentary to WebSphere. Like fish and chips.Ian is exactly right. The SpringSource Application Platform is another choice for Spring deployment. Nothing has changed in…
Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the JAX conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. JAX is one of Europe’s largest Java conferences, with over 2,000 attendees. The topic was The Future of Enterprise Java, and I expanded on the themes of my recent blog of predictions, going into more detail about the implications of Java EE 6 and the future of the application server.
I’ve uploaded the slides, which include 8 predictions for an interesting period in the evolution of enterprise Java. This is the first time I've referred to Joseph Stalin, Monica Lewinsky and Monty Python in the same presentation…
Spring Security 2.0 has been released. This is a major step forward for the Spring Portfolio. Spring (Acegi) Security is already the Java platform's most widely used enterprise security framework, with over 250,000 downloads on SourceForge and over 20,000 downloads per release. Through making it so much simpler to use, this release will undoubtedly take adoption to a new level. I'm particularly pleased about this release for a number of reasons: Acegi/Spring Security creator Ben Alex and Luke Taylor have done a great job. Ben will be talking about Spring Security at Java One next month. If you…
If the tech community were to host their own version of the popular TV show The Biggest Loser (or maybe Celebrity Fit Club) you would see enterprise Java front and center---bloated, overweight, tired, and drained. The future of enterprise Java is becoming clear. The morbidly obese legacy platforms are in decline, with leaner solutions increasingly used in production as well as in development. Legacy technologies such as EJB are becoming less and less relevant.The lukewarm takeup of Java EE 5 leaves it looking increasingly like the last gasp of traditional J2EE bloatware. Meanwhile, the Java…
My last blog showed how Spring is soaring past EJB. Research by BZ Media and others shows that Apache Tomcat is the leading open source application server with a 64% market penetration. The dominance of Spring and Tomcat is well-known. What people may not know as well is that thousands of organizations are running Spring on Tomcat as their middleware infrastructure. Those organizations want one company to turn to for the products and services they need to be successful. Today we announced our acquisition of Covalent Technologies. Not only does Covalent bring Apache leadership, but our…
Job listings are a good indicator of the true adoption of technologies. They indicate whether or not companies are spending money, making it possible to distinguish substance from hype; they indicate the importance for developers of gaining and growing the relevant skills (an important element of technology perpetuation); and they provide a good guide to the safety for companies in adopting a particular technology. Thus the jobtrends site of Indeed.com, a job listing aggregation site, is an important resource. It allows trends in the number of job requirements to be tracked over time, and…
Quite a day for news as we complete our first annual Spring eXchange in London. First, the news that Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL, and then the long anticipated acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle. Before commenting any further, I want to congratulate all of our friends at MySQL, especially Mårten Mickos, and all of our friends at BEA. The trend of consolidation in this industry is increasing. As an open source company, we are thrilled to see MySQL rewarded for their effort. We have seen how hard Mårten and his colleagues have worked to build their software, community and a strong…
Last Friday was Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare's birthday. Who is C. A. R. Hoare? If you're a programmer, you're probably familiar with Quicksort--an elegant and surprisingly simple sorting algorithm that is blazingly fast in most cases. If you studied computer science, you've almost certainly implemented Quicksort in numerous languages, and will recognize the animation on this page. Hoare invented Quicksort in 1960, and it's now the most widely used sorting algorithm.
Among other contributions, Hoare also invented the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) language used to specify the interactions of…
