J2EE heart line
Some days ago, when I was reading some posts on google reader, I started to read a shared one from a friend of mine about a lightweight application server that RedHat is going to release.
Good, I knew that RH was going to release a their package that slim the JBOSS distribution and left only a the embedded tomcat called jboss web, I thought that the post was only a way to launch the product… I was wrong.
Yesterday I noticed always in Greader the Rod Johnson’s post from Springsource.org Red Hat Reacts to SpringSource’s Leadership , I pointed my browser directly on the post, and I understood what is the new Red Hat product: The new application server is spring based, it seems to be a competitors for the spring dm and tc application server.
Reading the announcement seems that the failure of the J2EE stack for the enterprise applications is archived also in RH. Today few application actually needs an full J2EE stack, usually they needs only a servlet engine and some services as a JMS broker or/and an XA transaction manager. The functionalities that J2EE provides have been ignored since the first releases of the standard by the developers, and the reasons of that are the causes of the success of the spring framework : J2ee is too complex.
Writing an application using the pattern of a J2ee stack require a deep knowledge of the application server where the application will be deployed, and the deployment phase can be a nightmare, you have to fight with the class loader of the AS and with AS dependent descriptor files. if you are working in an environment where the separation of duties between developer and sysadmin is needed… a simple deployment could be a big mess.
The introduction of new paradigms as Service Oriented Architecture or Cloud Computing and technology as ESB and SCA, is the Coup de grâce for the J2EE. No matters where a service is deployed or how is implemented, you are free to choose, hence why don’t use a simple and real portable implementation: POJO.
Springsource makes the simplification of the J2ee stack its manifest, RH is going to follow the same path… the choice of IBM and Oracle are not yet defined… what will be ?
J2ee is (was) a standard defined throws steps shared with the developer community, the JCP influenced a lot the specification of J2EE; although it’s not an ISO or ECMA it’s standard de-facto, this assured a sort of portability between application server.
To add noise, Oracle bought SUN: now it’s the owner of the standard…
This can be the changing-game moment for Springsource, it can play the role of the independent third party and lead the transaction from J2ee to… whatever.
One such open source technology is the Spring Framework, a leading application framework that enables developers to quickly and easily create high quality applications for deployment into high-end application servers.
On the other side a simple search on developerworks it’s enough to understand that also IBM is not insensible to the Spring Framework appeal.
What will be in the enterprise application ? we will see. I hope that the new standard will be lead by the innovation not by the stock market. SpringSource is a good candidate.
