The Spring Framework re-invented enterprise Java in the last decade, becoming the dominant programming model in enterprise Java. Today we are releasing Spring Framework 4.0, a brand new major version of Spring that keeps Spring at the cutting edge of modern Java development. Together with the rest of the upcoming Spring IO Platform, Spring Framework 4.0 is positioned to empower the next decade of JVM based innovation, responding to, and setting trends in Developer Productivity, Big Data, Cloud, REST, and Micro Service Architecture.

Spring Framework 4.0 works beautifully with Java 8 and also…

By now you’ve probably heard about Pivotal. I’d like to take a moment here to explain what this means for Spring, and to tell you about some of our plans for 2013.

In case you missed it, here’s the essential background on Pivotal: Led by Paul Maritz, the initiative unites key people and projects from across EMC and VMware to bring “consumer grade” technology to the enterprise. We see a new generation of applications emerging that are powered by new data fabrics and will interact with and serve customers in the context of who they are, where they are, and what they are doing in the moment…

It’s JavaOne time again and this year you’ll find sessions on how Spring works with Java SE to address Big Data, NoSQL, and enterprise integration challenges. We’ve always worked hard to ensure that Spring remains at the forefront of enterprise Java by providing timely support for emerging trends and technologies. The numbers suggest that our users appreciate this. A recent report from Evans Data ("Spring Source Usage Study," Evans Data Corporation, September 2011) shows:

• Spring is the framework of choice among expert Java developers. More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today or planning to do so
• Spring usage continues to grow. More than half of existing Spring users expect to grow or significantly grow their use of Spring.
• Spring is delivering results. 70% of Spring users indicate at least a 50% productivity gain by using Spring and 73% indicate at least a 50% time reduction to deliver a completed project.
• Spring users are at the forefront of enterprise Java. Spring users are more cloud ready, and Spring adopters are more likely to have already deployed applications to the cloud.

Spring has always offered deployment flexibility. In the early days this meant a choice of application servers, but now this extends to choice of cloud platforms including our own Cloud Foundry. Spring has always provided strong data access support. In the early days this meant a choice of approaches for accessing a relational database, today this extends to a range of Big Data and NoSQL stores, data processing, and in-memory data grid capabilities. Spring has always valued developer productivity and provided first class support for writing server-side web applications. Today this extends to meet the modern requirements of HATEOAS-based REST APIs.

These are real and pressing concerns within the enterprise today. Cloud is everywhere, and now Big Data is firmly on the enterprise project radar too, creating a range of new requirements:

• Big Data: the need to store and get analytics from gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes of unstructured or semi-structured data
• Fast Data: the increasing need for low latency interactions with large sets of data, often driven by today’s mobile and social apps
• Flexible Data: the need to adapt data access to the most appropriate model for each application
• Cloud Delivery: the growing demand to access data as a service, provisioned on the cloud of your choice.

The latest Harvard Business Review survey indicates that 85% of organizations have Big Data initiatives planned or in progress. Application developers need to deliver capable, high quality solutions that integrate with this new world and can be deployed anywhere, on or off premise. NoSQL and NewSQL are also being used to address a wide range of use cases including:

• Managing large data streams of non-transactional data (logs, clickstreams)
• Fraud detection
• Timelines (a la Twitter)
• Synching offline and online data
• Online gaming
• Document, catalog and content management
• Archiving - storing a large continual stream of data that is still accessible on-line
• Embedded systems (small footprint databases in devices)

See this High Scalability blog entry for more details.

451 Research’s recent survey data highlights the changing shape of the data landscape. One size no longer fits all.

Enterprise developers can start taking advantage of these new technologies today with Spring and the familiar Spring programming model. Spring offers:

• Big Data processing via Spring Data’s support for Apache Hadoop and HBase, as well as Spring Batch and Spring Integration
• In-Memory data grid support via Spring Data GemFire
• Support for NoSQL key-value stores with Spring Data Redis
• Support for NoSQL document stores with Spring Data MongoDB
• Support for NoSQL graph databases with Spring Data Neo4j
• Support for NewSQL databases with SQLFire
• And of course traditional relational databases, such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and DB2, still have their place and can be accessed via Spring JPA and Spring JDBC Extensions, and made accessible via Spring Data REST

The thriving open source community around NoSQL, together with Spring, makes developing for the next generation of data stores and data processing more productive today. We don’t provide a single Java API for all persistence stores; this is not realistic given the fundamental differences between them. But we do provide a common and familiar programming model based on the concepts of templates and, where available, repositories. See Tobias Trelle’s recent InfoQ article for more details.

All in all, JavaOne 2012 is sure to be an action packed week, full of great Java tech talks, keynotes, and sessions including coverage of our own Big Data, NoSQL, and integration initiatives. Developers who want to get hands on with these technologies now also won't want to miss SpringOne 2GX in Washington DC October 15-18, 2012. We have a packed technical agenda covering all aspects of modern enterprise application development.

Today we will be releasing version 2.0 of the dm server. This represents a major milestone for the project, and for enterprise application development with OSGi in general. I’m delighted to now be able to reveal the next step in the dm Server journey: we have submitted a proposal at Eclipse.org to continue development of the dm Server as part of the Eclipse RT top-level project. The Eclipse nickname for the project is Virgo.

Quick links:

• Virgo proposal document at Eclipse.org
• Virgo community forum

What does this mean for users of dm Server?

The move to Eclipse.org has a number of practical implications for users of dm Server:

• Project hosting, home pages, forums, and downloads will all be moved to Eclipse.org infrastructure
• The license will change from the current (largely) GPL license, to the Eclipse Public License (EPL)
• It will be much easier for other organizations and community members to get involved in the ongoing development of Virgo

The combination of the license change and community hosting at Eclipse.org opens the codebase to a much broader set of users and developers.

The follow-on release of dm Server will be developed and released from Eclipse.org.

Why is SpringSource making this change?

The dm Server represents a significant amount of intellectual property (IP) and has been in full-time development for over 2 years. Why would SpringSource move this project to Eclipse.org?

We set out with a vision to make modular application development a…

This week the Gemini project proposal was unveiled at Eclipse.org. Gemini is part of the Eclipse RT (runtime) project which is "designed to foster, promote and house runtime efforts in Eclipse, on the basis of the Equinox framework and OSGi" (Eclipse RT mission statement). Gemini itself is an umbrella project bringing together a collection of modules designed for enterprise application development. SpringSource and Oracle are the first two companies providing committers to the project, and several other companies have expressed interest in joining too.

The initial projects being contributed to…

If you want to understand at a strategic level what the implications of VMware’s recently announced acquisition of SpringSource are, there are several good sources, including Steve Herrod’s (CTO of VMware) blog post, Rod Johnson’s commentary, Paul Maritz’s press and analyst call, and Darryl Taft’s insightful piece in eWeek.

In this post I will focus more on what this all means at a technical level, to give you an idea of the kinds of capabilities you can look forward to.

Firstly, let me reiterate that nothing changes with respect to our open source projects and  SpringSource product offerings. Nothing changes that is, apart from the fact that we’ll have even more opportunity in the future to add exciting new features to them. Spring 3.0 is coming soon, and we just released milestone 4. dm Server is making rapid progress towards a 2.0 release, and we have some very cool stuff up our sleeves for a forthcoming release of tc Server. The Eclipse tool support for Groovy is generating masses of interest, Grails is pushing on towards a 1.2 release…

In a press release made available by the OSGi Alliance yesterday, several leading vendors including SpringSource, IBM, Oracle, RedHat, Sun, SAP, ProSyst, and Paremus joined forces in their support of OSGi as the foundation for next generation server platforms.

To highlight some of the key points:

Craig Hayman, VP IBM WebSphere said

[IBM] has been shipping WebSphere Application Server built on OSGi since 2006. As a result, IBM clients benefit from a modular platform built with proven components and the ability to automatically use only the components required by their application.

Steven G. Harris, SVP of Development at Oracle said

Oracle WebLogic Server is a great example of the customer benefits of modularization, with its reduced footprint, improved startup time, and flexible configuration options. OSGi technology provides the standards based foundation...

Sacha Labourey, VP of Engineering for RedHat's middleware business said

Running OSGi technology in JBoss Enterprise Middleware Solutions enables our customers to deliver safer services and applications in a more dynamic runtime environment.

Tom Kincaid, Executive Director of Application Platforms at Sun Microsystems said

Sun has seen strong demand for OSGi technology within the GlassFish community. The GlassFish community will be able to take advantage of the modularity and dynamic extensibility implemented via an OSGi-technology based microkernel in the upcoming GlassFish v3 Prelude Release.

What all of the vendors quoted in the release have in common, including SpringSource, is that they build their server platforms on top of OSGi. This has the potential to deliver a set of benefits to users of those platforms including more modular server structures with the ability to run in a smaller footprint and to dynamically alter server characteristics and capabilities.

You need to look a bit harder at the various vendor offerings to determine to what extent they have been able to realize those benefits for you as a user. At SpringSource you could say we were "lucky" in this respect. We had the good fortune to be able to design…

The OSGi Alliance have posted an early draft of release 4.2 of the Service Platform specification.  SpringSource employees are active members of both the Core Platform Expert Group (CPEG) and the Enterprise Expert Group (EEG) within the Alliance. My personal involvement has been largely with the EEG, and particularly with RFC 124 "A Component Model for OSGi".

RFC 124 is a standardization of the core ideas behind Spring Dynamic Modules. If you look at the configuration schema, you'll see that it very closely resembles the "osgi" namespace provided by Spring Dynamic Modules (DM).  RFC 124 takes…

InfoQ has a discussion thread summarizing the reactions to the announcement of the SpringSource Application Plaform. Michael Burke asked a great question on that thread which can be paraphrased as "forgetting the hype surrounding OSGi, what benefits can I expect to see if I port an application currently packaged as an EAR to OSGi bundles?".

I started answering this question on the InfoQ thread, but my answer was growing too long for a comment so instead I'll address it here.

The question is a good one. The main difference you will see in an OSGi-based application versus a traditional JEE EAR-based application is improved modularity. So the question becomes, does this improved modularity bring me any benefits, and if so what are they? The book "Design Rules, The Power of Modularity" gives a very thorough treatment of the question. It's great background but I get that feeling that Michael may be looking for something a little less theoretical than what you'll find in that book…

** Updated May 2nd with case study :- see the bottom of this post for details ** I'm sure most of you reading this blog will have seen the announcement of the SpringSource Application Platform yesterday. If not, be sure to check out Rob's blog post which describes some of the motivation, programming model, and roadmap.

A couple of common questions are being asked that I'd like to address straight away in this post. After that I'll describe two other exciting announcements that complement the SpringSource Application Platform itself but that didn't grab the headlines yesterday: the…