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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]