VMware: corporate Java platform of Oracle became outdated

According to Rod Johnson (Rod Johnson), the senior vice president and the CEO of division of the products SpringSource (VMware) and also the creator of the first version of Spring, today Spring really plays the leading role in the innovation programming model of Java.

At least, there is one more company which , apparently, separates enthusiasm of VMware: Google selected Spring as a preferable programming model for the Google App Engine platform. And at the SpringOne G2X developers conference in Chicago these two companies announced end of a number of solutions on integration of Spring, Google App Engine and Google Web Toolkit. Johnson noted: in spite of the fact that Google left the JavaOne conference controlled by Oracle, it was the main sponsor of the SpringOne conference.

"We spoke with our clients, trying to understand - where the new growth where many new applications because there probably and there will be growth for App Engine are created is possible. And we felt that Spring really good platform for these applications", Brad Abrams, the product manager of division of Google Developer Tools told.

However not all are sure that Spring is the future in corporate developments of Java. Red Hat, for example, in general called into question need of existence of Spring Framework. "The last implementation of Java can offer simple, standard architecture which will reduce development time, at the same time the offer of the open, standard platform does unnecessary structures like Spring", Ashesh Badani, the senior director of division of JBoss Enterprise Middleware (Red Hat) wrote in the blog last week.

Nevertheless, VMware and Google already provided the first fruits of the cooperation. The plug-in for SpringSource is Tool Suite, will be available within the next two weeks that will allow developers to unroll the applications for Google App Engine. App Engine uses only a subset of a full range of Java API so Google worked to be sure - API used by Spring are available in Google App Engine.

Besides, Google Web Toolkit was integrated with Spring Roo, the tool generating the Spring code in compliance to the set requirements in the field of security, performance and other aspects. "Now Roo can generate client Internet-applications using Google Web Toolkit", Abrams told. At last, Google Speed Tracer, performance analyzer, is created in the Chrome browser and was included in the package of Spring Insight which is the analyzer of performance SpringSource Tool Suite.

Though VMware advances Spring mainly as a component for development of cloud applicaions, Johnson noted that it purchased popularity as an alternative of Java Enterprise Edition EJB (Enterprise Java Beans), for development of corporate applications. The company claims that Spring Framework use 2.5 million developers. "Communities open-source in general accepted relay from technologists of Oracle. A few years ago Spring caught up with EJB and now continues to be torn forward", Johnson told.

Engineers of Red Hat in the blog claim that the latest version of Java Enterprise Edition, JEE 6, eliminates need of such projects as Spring. In particular, it has inclusion of JSR (Java Specification Requests) 299 - the specification providing how to handle Dependency Injection, a set of much-needed procedures which provide interaction of program components. One of the main features of Spring that the product processes a context and Dependency Injection.

To strengthen the arguments Badani in the blog pointed to the written report of the colleague from Red Hat and the main developer JBoss, Lincoln Baxter which discussed process of migration of applications from Spring to Java EE 6. "For anybody not a secret that Spring Framework emerged as an easy alternative and abstraction for programming on Java EE as there was a perception that Java EE became bulky and excessively difficult, - Bakster wrote. - When reaches case, use of Java EE can be even simpler, than Spring use, and borrows much less time. You should find only a right direction and the correct documentation".

Johnson recognized that Java EE 6 adopted some ideas, from Spring, and, generally, it is more ordinary in use, than the previous versions which difficulties could take away developers to Spring. However Java EE 6 has no yet a full range of functions what are in Spring, like full-fledged Web framework and the accelerator of performance as Roo.

Java EE 6 is not widely implemented on application servers, Johnson claims. Though the next version of the JBoss application server on Red Hat will be supported by Java EE 6. She is not supported by IBM Websphere, the server open source Tomcat supports only a subset of functionality of Java EE 6. "I do not think that to compare programming models of Java EE and Spring, all the same, that to compare apple to apple, and, secondly, Java EE as Spring alternative, is simply impractical in the majority of deployments today", - Johnson concluded.