Back in 2004 JBoss had a tough decision to make. Should we keep Hibernate proprietary and under our sole control? Or should we bring it to a standards body? You know the decision we made. I think Spring and Interface 21 are at a similar crossroads, whether they know it or not. I’d like to call on Interface 21 to bring core Spring IoC to EE 6. Here’s why its a win-win situation for everybody.

Better business for Interface 21

I personally think that the main reason I21 hasn’t thought about standardizing Spring is because they are worried it will hurt their business. We had the exact similar fear with Hibernate. What would happen if we standardized Hibernate and gave the opportunity to vendors like Oracle and BEA to enter the ORM space and threaten our growing strangle hold on ORM frameworks? The reality of the situation was that there was a shrinking, but still very large, set of users out there still using CMP. Many of these organizations were married to standards and wouldn’t go proprietary, even though Hibernate was open source. What ended up happening was that when we brought Hibernate to the EJB 3.0 and JPA specification, Hibernate was recognized immediately as a migration path to EE 5. Hibernate downloads skyrocketed along with Hibernate related business. I just know that Spring and Interface 21 would notice similar gains if they aligned with EE 6.

The Spring community will probably scoff at any suggestion that the EJB user base is still large enough to make any impact on things, but this is just not the case. Yes, Spring has a large community, but EE 5 stopped much of the bleeding and breathed new life into the EJB specification. I know this because I’ve been out there. There’s also these compelling facts about EJB 3 momentum that I posted on a TSS thread back in June.

Better for the Spring community

Let’s face it, Spring is not a kernel. It has no deployment model. It is dependent on bootstrapping itself through the WAR init process, manually, or by proprietary app server specific init classes. It has no classloader scoping, delegating it to the application server it is running in. The Spring guys know this is a weakness of theirs, which is why they are so keen to align themselves with OSGi. They desperately need a standardized kernel to build their own stack. If Spring was brought to EE 6, they would get this deployment model they so thirst for. Not only this, but it would be even easier, more consistent, and simpler to package and deploy Spring components within other application servers like what we do with the JBoss Spring Deployer. The Spring community would also get the benefit of mixing and matching Spring technology with EE component models.

Now, a bit more touchy non-technical subject is the idea that Spring is controlled by one vendor. Yes, its open source, but, IMO, JBoss history proves that a vendor can maintain tight control over its space even if there is defection and forking. Way back in the day, people also complained of the stranglehold Marc Fleury had on JBoss. The thing is, I thought our users were isolated from any real or imagined evil we might inflict on the open source Java community because we were standards base. This isn’t so with Spring. Spring is now VC funded which means its founders and investors are looking for an exit strategy and payday event. There were recent rumors of acquisition we heard as well before they announced this funding. Yes, this sounds a lot like FUD from me, but it is just the plain reality of the software business. Having Spring standardized would isolate the Spring community from the mess of any acquisition, IPO, founder exit, or going out of business fire sale. Any real or imagined mess 😉

Better for Java EE

Although EE 5 added some IoC capabilities, its still both verbose and incomplete. For instance, you cannot define graphs of pojos within XML and inject it into an EE components. This limits EE to having to solely work with primitives when doing configuration. Not very flexible. Beyond technical reasons, having Spring standardized would make EE 6 a compelling platform to migrate to just like annotations and Hibernate standardization made EE 5 exciting. Bringing the weight of the Spring community into EE would greatly strengthen and unify the Java enterprise space.

Unification

Before EE 5, you had division in the Java ORM world. You had the CMP crowd: big, but legacy. The JDO crowd: noisy, but irrelevant. And the Hibernate crowd: large, de facto, but proprietary. What JPA did was get everybody together and start showing a unified path and vision for the Java ORM space. I think Spring and EJB are in a very similar situation and we would get similar benefit of joining them.

So Rod, Bill Shannon this is good for everybody, so lets get it done.