Today, Portability Matters More Than Ever

Engineering | Juergen Hoeller | April 29, 2008 | ...

Yesterday, I blogged about how Spring helps maximize application portability. Even if the portability problem has been an ongoing topic in enterprise Java land for many years, that blog was timely. Today, Oracle announced that its $6.7 billion acquisition of BEA Systems has closed. There is substantial overlap between the product sets of the two companies, so this is bound to bring uncertainty to the WebLogic and OC4J customer bases. WebLogic and OC4J may both fall into the "J2EE server" category but they are very different products with very different characteristics.

Since many enterprise…

Web Applications and OSGi

Engineering | Costin Leau | April 29, 2008 | ...

Since the first milestones of Spring Dynamic Modules, requests for running web applications in OSGi started to come in. It has been probably one of the most requested features and no wonder, once 1.0 final was released, web support has been the main focus of the 1.1 branch. I am pleased to report that, with the just released M2, as already hinted by Juergen, Spring-DM supports not just vanilla wars (available since 1.1.0 M1) but also Spring-MVC applications running inside OSGi. In this entry, I would like to briefly discuss the typical OSGi web scenario and Spring-DM's approach. But first,

Why deploy WARs in OSGi?

Easy question: OSGi natively provides versioning, package wiring and hot reloading. Imagine taking advantage of these features within your applications: you can stop embedding libraries under WEB-INF/lib and start sharing them between your web apps, avoid taglibs duplications (while keeping multiple versions running) and update, at runtime, only certain parts of your application. This is especially useful as web applications tend to be tiered and thus subject to a significant number of changes during their life cycle.

Why are web applications in OSGi problematic?

The Servlet specification revolves around the idea of a web container: a runtime environment for web components that provides standard services such as life cycle management (object creation and disposal, thread allocation), concurrency, HTTP request handling and so on. The OSGi platform on the other hand, acts also as a managed environment with its Service Registry, package wiring and versioning (to name just a few). To deal with this problem, the OSGi committee designed, part of the compendium specification, the Http Service.

Portability at the Framework Level

Engineering | Juergen Hoeller | April 28, 2008 | ...

Portability is a key factor in the Spring universe. We believe in portability at the framework level: Application components are written against a specific framework (or framework generation), such as Spring 2.5; the framework is then in turn responsible for adapting onto any underlying hosting environment. However, the specific application framework is above and distinct from the hosting environment. A brand-new framework version may be deployed onto an established generation of the hosting platform, as long as the fundamental capabilities of the environment are sufficient. This approach…

The Conference Season Rolls On

Engineering | Rod Johnson | April 24, 2008 | ...

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 6 and the future of the application server.
I’ve uploaded the slides, which include 8 predictions for an interesting period in the evolution of enterprise Java. This is the first time I've referred to Joseph Stalin, Monica Lewinsky and Monty Python in the same presentation.

Spring Security 2.0 Final Release: No More Dead Fairies

Engineering | Rod Johnson | April 17, 2008 | ...

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 adoption to a new level.

I'm particularly pleased about this release for a number of reasons:

  • It's a great thing for the Spring community. It's (a lot) simpler to use, as well as more powerful. It puts the most powerful enterprise Java security solution within the reach of many more users, pretty much eliminating the hurdles to adoption. See this tutorial for an example of just how much easier it makes it to secure a typical web application. The proliferation of XML bean definitions is a thing of the past.
  • It's a continuation of the work of Spring 2.x, through applying the power of a custom XML namespace to enable aggressive defaulting, while still allowing for customization.
  • Like Spring 2.5, it exhibits the current Spring Portfolio trend toward radical reduction in the need for XML.
  • It's a proof of the value of the SpringSource business model. Our revenue model enables us to invest more than ever in creating open source software. Without being able to hire both Acegi/Spring Security creator Ben Alex and the other major committer, Luke Taylor, this release either wouldn't have occurred or would have been much less extensive.
  • It's good for the fairy kingdom.

Acegi/Spring Security creator Ben Alex and Luke Taylor have done a great job. Ben will be talking about Spring Security at Java One next month. If…

Runtime Error Analysis in the SpringSource Tool Suite

Engineering | Alef Arendsen | April 14, 2008 | ...

Three weeks ago, the SpringSource Tool Suite was released. Christian, in charge of this product blogged about it already and we also have a webinar available for those of you that want to get up to speed with all of the functionality it currently offers. In this entry, I wanted to highlight the runtime error reporting functionality specifically.

When I'm programming, sometimes, the console window shows dozens of stack traces due to some error I've caused. Sometimes, I'm lucky and the stack trace looks familiar. If so, then the problem is probably easy to solve. Sometimes however, the…

The Biggest Loser's Next Contestant: Java Bloatware

Engineering | Rod Johnson | April 09, 2008 | ...

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 in production as well as in development. Legacy technologies such as EJB are becoming less and less relevant.The lukewarm takeup of Java EE 5 leaves it looking increasingly like the last gasp of traditional J2EE bloatware. Meanwhile, the Java EE 6 specification is finally set to allow for greater modularity, in a radical change which will have important implications for developers and is likely to rejuvenate competition among implementations. As the standards and the products based upon them have gathered pound after pound of cellulite, SOA, Web 2.0 and other infrastructural changes continually impose new requirements that were not foreseen…

Q2 Amsterdam Java Meetup - May 23rd 2008

Engineering | Alef Arendsen | April 08, 2008 | ...

It's been a while... for the Amsterdam Java Meetup that is. I've been traveling a lot and haven't been able to organize another meetup past quarter. But here we go again: the (almost) quarterly Amsterdam Java Meetup with free drinks (or at least, the first few rounds) will be hosted in grand-cafe de Jaren in Amsterdam (see below for more info on the location) on the 23rd of May. You can expect many Java devs (usually between 50 and 80 people turn up), technical as well as non-technical discussions and of course, the latest gossip in the Dutch Java industry. We'd love to hear from people from…

SpringSource Application Management Suite (AMS) Released

Engineering | Jennifer Hickey | March 31, 2008 | ...

It has been a busy few months since SpringSource partnered with Hyperic to bring our Application Management Suite (AMS) product to market. I am pleased to announce that the SpringSource AMS beta release is now available to all. Please take a moment to evaluate the software and post your thoughts on the beta forum. We are committed to providing the best application management experience possible for Spring-powered applications, and your feedback is much appreciated!

Those who expressed an interest in SpringSource AMS at The Spring Experience in December received an email announcing the beta…

What's New in Spring Web Services 1.5?

Engineering | Arjen Poutsma | March 28, 2008 | ...

After being in the works for about six months, I'm happy to announce that Spring Web Services 1.5.0 has been released! In this post, I'd like to go over some of the major new features.

New Transports

The 1.5 release includes two new transports: JMS and email. Using these new transports requires no Java code changes: just add a bit of configuration, and you're off! The JMS transport integrates nicely with Spring 2's Message-Driven POJO model, as indicated by the following piece of configuration taken from the airline sample application:


<jms:listener-container connection-factory="connectionFactory">
  <jms…

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