Spring open source trade off

[louise rochford]

Hope this isn't too much along the lines of a 'Meaningless drivel' post to be included in this forum, but many of the recent posts got me thinking...

A lot of folks seem to be put off Spring because they think that if you're working with enterprise java, you use EJBs period (hope you US posters like my limey use of your lingo ) Those who know, know this isn't true, but its the general feeling especially in management / those whose only interaction with enterprise java is viewing the front page of the Sun/IBM/Oracle etc website.

Now, obviously, the official java specs get designed by commitee & as Rod (amongst others) has bemoaned, this doesn't necessarily give rise to the best designs / frameworks. It does however give the specs an official status & the all important backing from the major players.

Good open source stuff like Spring gets designed & coded by people who are using the technology day in, day out, know what they're doing & have a real & immediate incentive to see the project work well. Great support network, fast moving development & timely releases...but it lacks 'official' recognition.

Do you think this lack of official recognition is a problem? (For me, it has been, but it was a trade off I thought was well worth making)

Is there any sign that the big players in java are starting to look favourably on Spring e.g. by including Spring xml manipulation tools out of the box?

Do you think design-by-committee will disappear in the next 5 years or so? I used to think open source was great for the little stuff (like ant), but big frameworks were for specification by large organisations (like Sun / W3C). Spring is getting bigger & bigger by the day. It seems like in the future you'll go to Sun for the language & underlying APIs, & go to Spring (& other such projects) to find out how to use them efficiently...

Just wondering...

Cheers,
Louise

BTW. It great to see so many post about Spring at last (though it does seem a tad restrictive to allocate it to the 'web' frameworks forum) Hoorah for book giveaways!

[Lasse Koskela]

Well, I for one am very happy to deliver my solutions faster than what [insert major J2EE vendor's consulting organization] is able with their corporate-standard EJB-based architectures.

Seriously speaking, look at where Struts is today. It started as an open source project, gained a following, and today it's an integral part of what the major vendors are selling for $$$. The same will inevitably happen again and again. If not with Spring, it will with some other open source project.

[Karthik Guru]

Originally posted by louise rochford:

Is there any sign that the big players in java are starting to look favourably on Spring e.g. by including Spring xml manipulation tools out of the box?

Jean's post kind of indicate that the vendors have recongnized and adopted those changes into ejb 3.0 spec! So i s'd be able to use ejb 3.0 and say specify a logging aspect, serialization aspect to my domain objects and so on.

[JeanLouis Marechaux]

I fully agree with you Louise.
J2EE is not EJB (hopefully) and many managers do not want to consider open sources solution because they are scared.
As Lasse said, Struts is a good example. I remember a couple of years ago when I had to struggle with a CTO to introduce Struts instead of developing a home made MVC framework. I'm quite sure that the same CTO accepts Struts in all the projects now :roll:

On the other hand, there's also an "EJB bashing attitude" on most forums, although, IMH, EJB model is not that bad. EJBs are just a bit complex. ;-) and require a good knowledge of the J2EE platform

Open source sometimes gains large momentum just because it is free of charge.
And each year (month ?) there's a new cool open source project to deal with
(this is definitively not free of charge !!)
Nevertheless, there's no silver bullet for our problems. Open sources can provide good frameworks/tools just like commercial vendors do. (and the opposite is true)

[JeanLouis Marechaux]

Originally posted by Karthik Guru:


Jean's post kind of indicate that the vendors have recongnized and adopted those changes into ejb 3.0 spec! So i s'd be able to use ejb 3.0 and say specify a logging aspect, serialization aspect to my domain objects and so on.

I've never meant that.. anyway....
EJB 3.0 uses many Hibernate concepts, mostly because Gavin King is part of the Expert Group.
This shows that open source ideas can be successfully introduced in Sun Spec

[Karthik Guru]

Originally posted by JeanLouis Marechaux:


I've never meant that.. anyway....
EJB 3.0 uses many Hibernate concepts, mostly because Gavin King is part of the Expert Group.
This shows that open source ideas can be successfully introduced in Sun Spec

Its gettign a little difficult to understand what you are actually trying to conclude.
You have to educate us a bit on ejb 3.0 though. In one of the posts you mention JBoss will provide through EJB3.0 whatever Spring has to offer. But at the same time you dont tell us whether ejb 3.0 will allow for fine-grained DI at all levels (not just session bean/ entity beans) , AOP.
Is EJB 3.0 a full blown IOC like Spring ?.It would be nice if you could elaborate a bit on what kind of interceptors are present as part of EJB 3.0? Is it just security and transaction ? / something more?
Does it mandate that it needs a JTA implementation? I'm not even referring to Spring MVC as i know that ejb 3.0 is not about mvc anyway. I think if you could answer these questions then we can have a good information exchange on Spring Vs EJB 3.0
Atleast i can go home with a very good understanding of these topics.

[Lasse Koskela]

Hint: Linda Demichiel's presentation on EJB 3.0 from JavaPolis 2004 is online (video stream) at http://www.javalobby.org/av/javapolis/index.jsp (haven't watched it myself, yet).