In a surprise announcement, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson announced that SpringSource has agreed to be acquired by Microsoft. InfoQ interviewed Johnson to learn more about this acquisition and what it will mean for the future of both Spring and the .Net Framework.
Johnson began by describing the terms of the acquisition - because SpringSource is a private company, full details of the transaction will not be disclosed; however, the purchase amount was greater than the $1 Billion USD that Sun paid for MySQL in January. Johnson also said that the acquisition would result in a change of focus for SpringSource - a greater focus will be placed upon filling out the .Net-based side of the Spring Portfolio, with a .Net-based version of Spring Web Flow becoming the basis for the ASP.Net web development APIs.
Johnson told InfoQ that integration of the Microsoft and SpringSource development teams has already begun:
- Johnson, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie are discussing how the Spring Framework can be leveraged to address the historical problem of meeting deadlines at Microsoft by simplifying and modularizing Microsoft's many codebases
- Christian Dupuis of the Spring IDE team has begun working with the Visual Studio team to integrate the two codebases together
- Juergen Hoeller is working with the Office team on integration points for the upcoming 2009 release of the Office suite
- Costin Leau is exploring the creation of an OSGi runtime container for .Net
- Adrian Colyer is working together with S. Somasegar to plan out future directions and strategies for Microsoft's Developer Division
Johnson also indicated that the Spring Framework would be integrated into the Windows operating system, with users having the ability to configure most settings and applications via associated Spring Beans. When asked whether the next version of Windows (Windows 7) would be called "SpringHorn" Johnson declined to comment - however, he did express excitement about the prospect of Spring being on every Windows installation.
Mark Pollack, founder and lead of the Spring.Net project, added:
Anders Hejlsberg, Erik Meijer and I have had some excellent conversations around where Spring.Net can improve the development process for .Net applications, and we expect to add many of the existing Spring APIs in the .Net Framework 4.0 release. The AOP and Aspect namespaces will likely be added to the System namespace, and the DAO and Data namespaces will augment the existing ADO.Net APIs.