Originally posted by Jay Dellinger:
I work on a few projects that are starting to migrate toward using Spring instead of some custom home-grown code. Spring looks great so far, but what are some pros and cons versus HiveMind? It seems to have some nice features as well, and was wondering what others thought. I have only skimmed some information on Hivemind and am not very familiar with it's inner workings yet. Is it worth the effort or should I stick to Spring?
Ryan has looked into Hivemind more than I have (it's on my queue of things to look into when I get time, though). But, here's what I know about Hivemind as compared to Spring.
First off, there's a wealth of more Spring info available than Hivemind. It'd be great if Howard would write "Hivemind in Action", but that's not happened yet.
Hivemind is mostly just an IoC container. Spring is an IoC container, plus a lot more. Hivemind has some limited AOP features, but nothing compared to Spring. Spring also comes with a wealth of enterprise features such as integration with various persistence frameworks, remoting support, declarative transactions, and more.
In short, Hivemind looks really interesting, but Spring comes with so much more.
All that said, there's supposedly integration possiblities between Hivemind and Spring. I think I recall Howard mentioning that there's a way to integrate Spring into Hivemind such that Spring beans can be exposed as services in Hivemind. But, to be honest, I don't know much about that.