Sometimes important changes sneak up. Such changes aren't driven by marketing campaigns, but by many individual decisions; there's no fanfare; by the time they're observed, they have surprising momentum. I mentioned one such development in my opening keynote at the recent Spring Experience conference: the steady rise of Tomcat.

Recently we've begun running polls on SpringFramework.org, and some of the results are interesting. The question Which application server(s) do you use? produced the following results: BEA WebLogic (various versions) and JBoss AS shared first place among Java EE app…

We're changing our name. This week, Interface21 will become SpringSource.

As we have built the company, Interface21 has earned a reputation for exceptional products, thought leadership, outstanding people, professionalism and top quality support and services. As we continue to deliver all of those things, we believe that changing our name will help our company bring them to a wider audience.

When I founded Interface21 in 2004, I had to pick a name. I believed Spring to be the future of enterprise Java, and "Interface21" reflected those feelings—the framework for the 21st Century. Now we’re…

Several users have asked whether we are committed to Spring Java Configuration, and how it sits with the annotation configuration option introduced in Spring 2.5. The answer is yes, we are committed to Java Config; and these two approaches are not mutually exclusive.

These two configuration approaches are quite different: the @Autowired annotation in the Spring Framework configures components using annotations in business objects, while Spring Java Config takes a unique approach of externalizing the annotations in dedicated configuration classes. Neither of these approaches is uniquely right…

As I've posted before, Interface21 is getting involved with the Java EE 6 effort, and various of our folk including myself, Juergen Hoeller, Keith Donald and Rob Harrop will be involved in a number of expert groups.

This means that we're getting more involved with the JCP in general. We respect the confidentiality and other provisions of the JCP, so we won't talk about anything that isn't public. However, I would like to talk about our goals for JCP involvement and the fundamental approach we will bring. Of course we are just one company among many companies and individuals, so we will just be…

In the aptly titled Nonsense about Interface21, a SourceLabs employee disagrees with my contention that commit rights are necessary to provide credible open source support.

Before I reply: I want to make again something completely clear that I already stated in my last blog, but seems to have been misinterpreted by some: Interface21 has no desire to prevent others making money from Spring. Our track record proves that. We welcome others writing about Spring and providing Spring services. Or basing products on Spring, like Matt Raible's AppFuse. We wish them success. Spring has partly gotten…

My blog a couple of months ago about models of open source businesses seems to have struck a chord. I've had many positive responses, and it prompted an interview request from a site called "How Software is Built". My interview is here.

Finally someone from OpenLogic has posted an interesting reply. Bryan Noll left some comments in a reply to my blog that merit a proper response.

First and foremost, I think your assertion that it is not healthy for a project or open source in general when people who have no real investment in a particular project offer support for it is an interesting one… one I've not heard before. I think there's enough validity to it to make a company like ours consider it and genuinely examine our responsibility to the open source projects we support. The result of this examination, in my mind, would be a demonstrable policy OpenLogic would have in order to mitigate the potential concerns you're raising. I'm sure I don't know what exactly that would be, so allow me to be vague at this point. This dovetails nicely though into some of the issues I have with what you're saying.

I think it would be pretty simple to find such a "demonstrable policy". OpenLogic needs to understand that the opening comment in Stormy's post that "Developers that work on open source software typically have day jobs that pay pretty well...so they work on open source software for free and write code during the day for big bucks" is largely wrong, understand where the open source software they hope to profit from comes from, partner appropriately, and set a price point that allows for genuine support. An alternative would be to stop claiming to provide enterprise support, and be clear that what is being offered is a kind of on-call development assistance, with no guarantee of being able to resolve critical issues. Which takes me back to why I felt strongly enough about Stormy's post to deconstruct it.

I see the aggregation model as a supermarket style business. When I shop at at supermarket, I expect that they will take a (small) cut from everything I buy, in return to dealing with many suppliers, bringing all the…

Interface21 got mentioned in testimony before Congress.

Jonathan Silver, a venture capitalist and founder of Core Capital Partners, testified on Thursday against proposed changes in tax rates applying to VCs. One of his arguments was that venture-based companies create jobs across the US:

Where will the next important businesses come from? The truth is, no one knows and that’s why venture capitalists look everywhere, and in all fifty states, for those opportunities. It’s why venture funds have backed Music Nation in New York City and Incept Biosystems in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Interface21 in West Melbourne, Florida, Boston Power in Westborough, Massachusetts and Click Forensics in San Antonio, Texas.

Actually, our headquarters are moving to San Mateo, California. Like many software vendors, we believe that Silicon Valley is the best place to achieve our potential. The largest concentration of our partners is here, and it's a great place to recruit executive talent in the software business. However, Silver's point is still valid. We are creating jobs in Florida--where our web team is based and is currently doing great things with Spring Web Flow…

The Java EE 6 proposal (JSR 316) was published today. I believe that this will be the most important revision of the platform since it was released nearly 10 years ago, and that it should be welcomed by users of the technology. Interface21 is happy to be a supporter of this JSR, and I am looking forward to contributing to it.

Java EE (known as J2EE for most of its history) has played a valuable role in creating a market for Java middleware. However, over those 10 years, important issues have emerged with the platform, such as:

• The need for a Java EE compliant server to be bloated with a range of functionality that is of little interest to the vast majority of users
• The fact that enterprise requirements have changed since J2EE was envisaged and that a "one size fits all model" is less and less appropriate
• The fact that enterprise Java has been greatly strengthened by the emergence of frameworks (especially in open source) that make developers more productive and their production applications more efficient and maintainable
• New challenges such as Ruby on Rails, and even .NET, showing that, in a time of rapid change and innovation, a cosy 2-3 year release cycle imperils the entire platform

Java EE 6 is an important revision of the platform that has the…

Michael Hickins recently published a piece on eWeek entitled Is Open Source Dying? The title drew me in, and no doubt plenty of other folk too. But the article doesn't prove the case, although it contains some interesting points that merit discussion.

Most of the article concerns speculation about the experience of government with open source, and the motives of vendors such as IBM. I prefer to judge companies and individuals by their actions, rather than speculation about their motives, and there is plenty of evidence that IBM, for example, takes open source very seriously. There's plenty of…

SpringOne is humming along nicely. This year it's a 3 day show, up from 2 days last year, and once again it's great to see hundreds of attendees at a Spring conference. For once I'm quite relaxed at a show, as after the opening keynote I have no further sessions, and don't need to work on slides.

Right now, Adrian is preparing to make a major announcement about Spring tooling. Well actually he's giving a uniquely personal take on duck typing, as I'm sure you'll hear...

More about that later, but first I need to share some news from yesterday. I was happy to be able to announce that we have…