In the last session of SpringOne yesterday, Dave Syer, Scott Wintermute, Lucas Ward and Wayne Lund all presented on Spring Batch. I didn't actually attend (since I had an early cab ride), but I stuck my head in and was yet again astounded by the amount of interest.

Back at JavaOne we had an immense amount of interest in this solution as well, with plenty of visitors calling by the booth to quiz us about batch.

It's all too easy in this world of Ajax and Rich Internet Applications to forget that a large number (a majority maybe?) of large scale enterprise applications are batch-oriented. Batch is like the dirty little secret that Java tries to hide from the world - but no more!

With Spring Batch we are liberating the batch job and making it a first class citizen in the enterprise Java space. Developers will have a real option for moving off the mainframe for batch onto a robust, performant Java platform.

I've been heavily involved with the design of SB and what really amazes me even now is the wide-ranging applicability of the Spring programming model. By simply getting out of the way of developers, using a pure POJO model and providing a first-class application platform, the Spring model is setting the standard for programming model across the Java space.