Rod Johnson: 2006 the year Spring became Ubiquitous

Rod Johnson kicked off the opening keynote of The Spring Experience conference declaring that 2006 was year Spring became ubiquitous. The keynote started with Rod demonstrating the European Patents office site which is built using Spring Web Flow. Rod went on to describe other types of high profile users of Spring including:

• a college savings plan site for parents
• Voca: which processes all bank transfers in the UK
• "a good proportion of online travel bookings are using spring"
• Many major airlines are running Spring    
  

Rod went on to declare that "2006 was the year Spring was confirmed as the defacto standard", citing a Forrester report that said that "a majority of enterprises are using Spring" and also a BEA dev2dev survey that found that "68% of respondents reported using Spring."  2006 had saw a number of events "underpin the growth of Spring adoption", which according to Rod were:

Februrary.
 - Arjen Poutsma joins Interface21, focused on Spring Web Services.
May
 - Spring gets a gold award for innovation at the JAX conference in Germany.
 - Pitchfork released in cooperation with BEA who is using Spring inside WebLogic.
 - Oracle also announces Spring integration, and that Oracle Developer Depot runs Spring
 - Acegi Security goes 1.0
June
  - French online tax portal based on Spring goes into production - handles taxation for 34 million users   
  - Spring One held in Antwerp, belgium
July
  -  Voca payment engine goes live in the UK, coinciding with Rod's birthday. Voca has handled 80M/ transactions/day since. Voca processses direct debits, credits, and  money orders between banks.
August
   - Spring LDAP joins the Spring portfolio
   - Interface21 trains its 1000th developer on Spring, they have a huge list of upcoming trainings
September
   - Spring gets it's 1 millionth download
October
    - Spring 2 final releases. 12,000 downloads in the fist 24 hours
    - Spring  Web Flow goes 1.0 final.
    - Former Solarmetric co-founder Neelan Choksi joins I21 from BEA, where he managed the open sourcing of Kodo as the OpenJPA project. Adrian Colyer and Ramniavs Laddadd also joined I21 last year.
 
2007 will be an even more exciting year, according to Rod. Upcoming are releases of Spring OSGi, Spring Web Services, and further improvements to Spring Web Flow. In future Spring will follow a release train (like Eclipse Callisto) to coordinate the releases of various Spring portfolio projects.  In regards to Spring OSGi, Rod predicted that "I believe this is going to be a very big story in 2007."  

Rod Johnson will also be presenting at QCon in London (March 12-16) along with Martin Fowler, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Pragmatic Dave Thomas and others.    See also the Spring content portal on InfoQ at infoq.com/spring.