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InfoQ Homepage News SpringSource Announces Commercial Software Strategy, Spring Integration

SpringSource Announces Commercial Software Strategy, Spring Integration

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At The Spring Experience yesterday, SpringSource (the company behind Spring) announced their commercial software subscription strategy as well as Spring Integration.  Included for subscription customers will also be Spring Tools suite & management suite, and Oracle RAC integration were also announced today.  Certification on Spring will also be offered early next year.  InfoQ video interviewed Spring founder Rod Johnson & SpringSource COO Neelan Choksi to get the news from the source.



Spring Integration is an EAI framework offering simplified ways to solve EAI tasks such as message transformation and routing.  Architect Mark Fisher wrote about the project & Rod described it in the video) as an implementation of several EAI patterns from Grgor Hophe's book. The project is currently in 0.5 but 1.0 final will be released in Q2 & support:
multiple configuration formats (XML, namespace, and annotations), point-to-point and publish/subscribe channels, and several adapters (minimally: JMS, RMI, HttpInvoker, Hessian/Burlap, File, EMail, JDBC, stream, and Spring ApplicationEvents). It will also work seamlessly with Spring's transaction management and dynamic language support.
Another message routing & transformation framework that integrates well with Spring is Mule ESB, which was present at last year's The Spring Experience.

SpringSource will be building a number of value-ad tools on top of it's free and open source programming models & frameworks. The initial product set include the SpringSource's Application Management Suite, Tools Suite, and Adanced Pack for Oracle Database.

The Application Management Suite, built jointly with Hyperic, and will offer: 
  • Auto-discovery of Spring-managed applications and components and the platforms and application servers that they run on
  • Monitoring of Spring applications, components and runtime
  • Custom alert configuration and corrective actions
  • Performance and service-level report generation
  • Automatic calculation and updating of baselines for metrics
  • JConsole support
Darryl Taft reports that "The SpringSource Advanced Pack for Oracle Database subscription provides support for Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) Fast Failover Connection, integration of the Oracle Streams AQ (Advanced Query) Java Message Service feature with Spring local JDBC transactions, improved support for Oracle's XML data types and other features."

The Spring Tools Suite was covered by InfoQ before and builds on the Spring IDE & Eclipse Mylyn in order to ease the development of large Spring applications, and incorporate other key features, ranging from issue tracking to code quality, in order to better support a Spring application’s entire lifecycle.

Starting Jan 15th certification on the Spring framework will be available, with certifications on "Web Technologies”, “AOP Methodologies”, and "Enterprise Application and Information Integration” coming later in the year.

On Thursday evening, Forrester analyst John Rymer keynoted on application platform trends, in which he mentioned that while in the past we had commercial vendors & committees of vendors innovating in both runtimes & programming models - open source projects such as Struts & Spring were successful examples of programming models that emerged driven by open source. Going forward, John predicted
open source will take on the role of providing the programming model, while commercial vendors provide the runtimes those programming models run on or are improved by.

This trend was echoed by Rod in the video interview above when asked about how they will maintain their open source culture now that they also have pure-commercial offerings.   Rod pointed out that Spring itself and the Spring portfolio is Apache licensed and will remain so; in addition, new programming models such as Spring Integration will also be done as open source:
We really think that open source is the only way to define programming models today, we are not in the business of creating proprietary programming models.
SpringSource's business strategy going forward however will be to provide value-added runtimes for commercial subscription customers to complement their open source programming models.  Rod emphasized that their new business model will allow them to grow in a way that will enable them to contribute even more to open source.

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