The production of nonsense on open source is a highly competitive field. However, I've just come across something that raises (lowers?) the bar: a post by an OpenLogic blogger entitled What's your time worth? It's not a long piece, which is handy, as it makes it easier to deconstruct paragraph by paragraph. I'm focusing on enterprise Java, about which I can speak from experience. The blogger gets to the point right away with a concise statement of why she doesn't understand open source in the enterprise: The post now moves onto economics--or, to be precise, an attempt to argue that the…

You may have heard the announcement that Interface21, the company behind Spring, recently raised $10m dollars. Given that we've been around for almost 3 years, and have achieved a lot to date, you might wonder why. Why did we raise money and what are we going to do with it? Over the last two years, we've built a great team. Juergen Hoeller, Adrian Colyer, Keith Donald, Colin Sampaleanu, Mark Pollack, Ben Alex, Rob Harrop… It's scary to to start typing that list because I know that I can't include all the talented technologists in this company, and I don't want to imply any ordering of merit…

It's been a while since I had time to blog. We've been busy. We raised $10m. As Adrian has pointed out, we've been very active in product development. I've written more code myself than usual in the last couple of months. (Mainly on experimental stuff, which may or may not see the light of day, but it's fun, and sometimes I do something that turns out to be useful.) I've spent a lot of time speaking to press and analysts; we're getting huge press interest these days. Press/analyst calls can be tiring, but can also be valuable, as many of these guys are smart and ask thought-provoking questions…

Hopefully one or more open source businesses will be among the standout successes of early 21st century capitalism. However, it's interesting to look back at one of the standout successes of late 20th century capitalism for an instructive example of one of the unusual challenges facing open source businesses. Wal-Mart's history is well known. The first Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962. Five years later there were 24 stores across Arkansas. In 1968, Wal-Mart opened its first stores outside Arkansas, in Missouri and Oklahoma. Both those states, of course, neighbour Arkansas. Wal-Mart…

On the theme of application servers embracing Spring, another update. Oracle have been working on value added integration with their application server. This is similar to what we have with WebLogic 8.1 and above in WebLogicJtaTransactionManager. The OC4JJtaTransactionManager should be used in place of the generic JtaTransactionManager in an OC4J environment, and provides the following benefits: For those familiar with JTA, using the UserTransaction, as you do when controlling transactions programmatically in Java EE, has some significant gaps, perhaps understandable given the now obsolete…

Sun take open source seriously these days, and users seem to be starting to take Sun open source seriously too. GlassFish was late to the party in open source application servers, but it seems to be gaining traction. And, more importantly, it actually seems to be pretty good. Various Interface21ers, including Costin and Juergen, have taken a look at GlassFish and given it the thumbs up (although we haven't yet worked with it in production). From what I've heard, performance is excellent--probably substantially due to the reworked servlet engine based on NIO. The JPA implementation--TopLink…

Congratulations to the WebLogic team on shipping a preview of WebLogic 10, which passes the Java EE 5 CTS. It's good to see BEA getting back to their tradition of being quick off the mark, after their aberration with J2EE 1.4. This is interesting news for the Spring community, because WebLogic 10 uses Pitchfork internally. The Pitchfork Project is an open source project led by Interface21 and collaboratively developed with BEA that implements EJB 3.0 interception and JSR-250 injection on top of Spring. It is used inside the WebLogic 10 EJB container and in other parts of the server to meet new…

I had a great time at the Spring Experience conference last month. One pleasant surprise I had was the extent of the recent work the Spring IDE team have been doing. I ran into Spring IDE developer Christian Dupuis several times at the conference, and it seems that each time he'd implemented a new feature... The forthcoming 2.0 release of Spring IDE is a comprehensive update to match the new features in Spring 2.0. And the Spring IDE team is making great progress with two of the big ticket items: XML extension namespaces and the AOP enhancements. (Btw, in case you're wondering why I haven't…

A few weeks ago I blogged about the origins of the name Spring. We also get many questions about the origins of the name Interface21. For anyone who's read my books or considered the design of Spring, the interface part is hardly a surprise. It plays on both the OO concept of an interface (for which I've always had a deep love) and the notion of the interface to a system. For example, putting a web interface onto an existing green screen system--something I was actually doing when I first thought of the company name. So far, so good. The real problem is with the numbers. As with the name…

Thanks to our philosophy of pluggability and a lot of hard work in the implementation, the Spring IoC container (like most of the rest of Spring) is extremely flexible. One point that is often missed is that Spring configuration need not be in XML, although the XML format is by far the most commonly used. Spring has its own internal metadata format in the form of the BeanDefinition interface and subinterfaces. The BeanFactory and ApplicationContext implementations that represent IoC container instances are powered by this Java metadata, and are quite separate from metadata parsing, which is…