Author Archive for Rod Johnson

Portability, Fish and Chips

It's been great to hear so much discussion on the SpringSource Application Platform, online and on the floor here at JavaOne. One of the most insightful comments is from WebSphere transaction architect Ian Robinson:
Does any of this affect WebSphere? Well, nothing has changed in the core Spring framework. Regardless of what the future holds for […]

The Conference Season Rolls On

Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the JAX conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. JAX is one of Europe’s largest Java conferences, with over 2,000 attendees. The topic was The Future of Enterprise Java, and I expanded on the themes of my recent blog of predictions, going into more detail about the implications of Java EE […]

Spring Security 2.0 Final Release: No More Dead Fairies

Spring Security 2.0 has been released. This is a major step forward for the Spring Portfolio. Spring (Acegi) Security is already the Java platform's most widely used enterprise security framework, with over 250,000 downloads on SourceForge and over 20,000 downloads per release. Through making it so much simpler to use, this release will undoubtedly take […]

The Biggest Loser's Next Contestant: Java Bloatware

If the tech community were to host their own version of the popular TV show The Biggest Loser (or maybe Celebrity Fit Club) you would see enterprise Java front and center—bloated, overweight, tired, and drained.
The future of enterprise Java is becoming clear. The morbidly obese legacy platforms are in decline, with leaner solutions increasingly used […]

Some Decisions are Easy – Like SpringSource Acquiring Covalent

My last blog showed how Spring is soaring past EJB. Research by BZ Media and others shows that Apache Tomcat is the leading open source application server with a 64% market penetration. The dominance of Spring and Tomcat is well-known. What people may not know as well is that thousands of organizations are […]

Spring Overtakes EJB as a Skills Requirement

Job listings are a good indicator of the true adoption of technologies. They indicate whether or not companies are spending money, making it possible to distinguish substance from hype; they indicate the importance for developers of gaining and growing the relevant skills (an important element of technology perpetuation); and they provide a good guide to […]

The Power of Adoption: Why no Company is Big Enough to Deny Developers What They Want

Quite a day for news as we complete our first annual Spring eXchange in London. First, the news that Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL, and then the long anticipated acquisition of BEA Systems by Oracle. Before commenting any further, I want to congratulate all of our friends at MySQL, especially Mårten Mickos, and all […]

Happy Birthday Tony Hoare

Last Friday was Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare's birthday. Who is C. A. R. Hoare? If you're a programmer, you're probably familiar with Quicksort–an elegant and surprisingly simple sorting algorithm that is blazingly fast in most cases. If you studied computer science, you've almost certainly implemented Quicksort in numerous languages, and will recognize the animation on this […]

Is it a Tomcat, or the Elephant in the Room?

Sometimes important changes sneak up. Such changes aren't driven by marketing campaigns, but by many individual decisions; there's no fanfare; by the time they're observed, they have surprising momentum. I mentioned one such development in my opening keynote at the recent Spring Experience conference: the steady rise of Tomcat.
Recently we've begun running polls on SpringFramework.org, […]

Interface21 becomes SpringSource

We're changing our name. This week, Interface21 will become SpringSource.
As we have built the company, Interface21 has earned a reputation for exceptional products, thought leadership, outstanding people, professionalism and top quality support and services. As we continue to deliver all of those things, we believe that changing our name will help our company bring them […]