Spring as the New Java EE

I just ran across this article on TSS that refers to Spring as being the new Java EE. It provides some validation for the recommendations that we’ve been giving to clients for the past few years in regards to Spring being a preferred platform.

The end of the article points out that Spring is being integrated with OSGi. This is actually a big deal. For those who don’t know what OSGi is, here’s a excerpt from the Spring page discussing it:

"The Spring-OSGi project makes it easy to build Spring applications that run in an OSGi framework. A Spring application written in this way provides better separation of modules, the ability to dynamically add, remove, and update modules in a running system, the ability to deploy multiple versions of a module simultaneously (and have clients automatically bind to the appropriate one), and a dynamic service model."

Or to put it another way, an entire Swing application module and all it’s dependencies can be bundled together and dropped into and used within another application with minimal, if any, added configuration required (and no conflicting dependency nightmares).

It also mentions some several upcoming Spring integration packages (e.g. JCA, CICS, IMS, an Eclipse based Spring IDE, etc). Oh, and it looks like Acegi is being absorbed directly into the Spring project as Spring security.

One final thing that was really interesting was this statement:

"Last but not least, next generation application servers from BEA, and maybe IBM, will be built on top of Spring"

Very interesting stuff, casting further doubt as to just what the heck is going to happen to Java EE. The most likely scenario being that it just becomes the de facto “heavyweight” deployment environment for Spring applications.