SpringSource, JBoss and the Modular Application Server
Friday, July 25th, 2008
I read Rod Johnson’s post on Oracle raising the price of Weblogic a few weeks ago and have been thinking a lot about his recent comments about the SpringSource Application Platform and his predictions for the future of JEE. The impression I have gotten is that Rod thinks the JEE Application Server is dying. Perhaps I am naive in disagreeing, but I just don’t see it. I would agree that the Spring + Hibernate + Tomcat + Web Framework of the Month stack that is very popular meets the need in many cases, but there are instances where a full container is going to fit the bill much better.
My support for this opinoin lies in my deep love of distributed transactions and message-driven applications, where a full JEE container provides nice integration points as part of the spec. Some of you might assert that you can do message driven apps outside of JEE App Server just fine, but only if you want to give up easy integration with a JTA transaction manager.
Back to the SpringSource Application Platform. I respect Rod and SpringSource a ton and I love how the Spring Framework has changed the way I write software, but I have to wonder if part of this is marketing cruft related to the fact that Spring Source is now touting their own application server. My biggest complaint is against all the talk about how the SpringSource Application Platform is so modular with all of it’s OSGI-loaded goodness. JBoss had a modular application server in 2002!
My other complaint is that I don’t think that OSGI Bundles are going to actually solve the complaints about how complex the packaging of JEE applications is. Does it have nice dynamic features and slick ways to handle classloading and dependency managemant with hot replacement at runtime? Absolutely! Will Average Joe Developer be able to make his own OSGI bundles all work together with a miriad of 3rd party bundles with differing dependency requirement without running into strange classloading issues and dependecy conflits with greater ease than he can right now in JEE? My guess is no. By the way, JBoss has been letting you break the rules about how to deploy you JEE application for a long time, allowing for much simpler packaging if that is what you are interested in.
Tags: spring
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