Author Archive for Rod Johnson

More Weapons for the War on Complexity: SpringSource Acquires Groovy/Grails Leader

I am delighted to announce that SpringSource has acquired G2One, the company behind Grails and Groovy.
Why?
I’m excited about this deal for many reasons.
Grails is a great fit with Spring and SpringSource technologies. Grails is built on Spring. It offers another route to adopt Spring, the de facto standard component model for enterprise Java. All [...]

A Word About the Election

No, not the Obama/McCain smackdown on Nov 4. As you may have read in SD Times, SpringSource has been elected to the JCP Executive Committee for Java SE/EE, along with SAP, Ericsson, Nokia, Philips, and IBM. I will be the SpringSource representative.
Not that the JCP matches the scale of the presidential race. But this is [...]

A Question of Balance: Tuning the Maintenance Policy

Running a business is like writing code in at least one respect: You don’t always get it right the first time, even if you know what you want to achieve—but you do get a better result in the end if you are prepared to rework things when necessary. At SpringSource, we had a clear vision [...]

Pumping it dry: $200 a barrel and $25,000 per CPU

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 [...]

Open Source, Open Strategy: The SpringSource Manifesto

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.
Our History
The Spring story began in 2001, when I began working on [...]

Portability, Fish and Chips

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 Conference Season Rolls On

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 [...]

Spring Security 2.0 Final Release: No More Dead Fairies

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 [...]

The Biggest Loser's Next Contestant: Java Bloatware

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 [...]

Some Decisions are Easy – Like SpringSource Acquiring Covalent

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 [...]