Interview: Rod Johnson Discusses Spring, OSGi, Tomcat and the Future of Enterprise Java

Posted by Ryan Slobojan on Jun 18, 2008

Sections

Operations & Infrastructure,

Enterprise Architecture,

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Application Servers ,

Web Frameworks ,

Acquisitions ,

Enterprise Architecture ,

Java

Tags

Apache Tomcat ,

JCP ,

BEA ,

Spring Dynamic Modules ,

Spring Security ,

Oracle ,

Spring ,

SpringSource Application Platform ,

Acquisition ,

Spring Web Flow ,

OSGi

In this interview from QCon London 2008, Rod Johnson discusses the Spring Portfolio, the Oracle/BEA and Sun/MySQL acquisitions, Java EE 6, Tomcat and Spring, Spring Dynamic Modules, the future of enterprise Java, the benefits of OSGi for application developers, the Covalent acquisition and Spring 3.0. Johnson also alludes to the SpringSource Application Platform, which was announced a month after this interview was filmed.

Watch Rod Johnson Discusses Spring, OSGi, Tomcat and the Future of Enterprise Java (25 minutes).

On the Covalent acquisition:

it appears we got a good deal because, at the time when we were working on the acquisition, Sun announced that they paid one billion dollars for the M in LAMP. Well we paid less than one billion dollars for the A! That’s a little flippant, and obviously no one can actually own an Apache project, I mean we fully understand the Apache community. The acquisition of Covalent reflected a number of factors: firstly, like I think any acquisition that is going to succeed, it was driven by customers. So we had already discussed with Covalent customers who were talking to both companies and wanted from Covalent support for Tomcat and possibly the Apache web server, and wanted from SpringSource support for Spring. So, it was very clear that we had to do some kind of partnership.

On the benefits of OSGi for application developers:

The opportunity for application developers are really the similar benefits that you get with sever infrastructure. So one of the benefits that you can get is, when we are talking about modularity and of course running just what you need instead of a more heavyweight platform, OSGi is a technology that can literally just start those bundles at runtime that you need to do something. So computers are much better than people at working out… If you enable them to work out exactly what they need to load to do something, they will do an extremely good job of it. So I think one of the key benefits that we can see is, achieve more modular middleware platforms with just that set of components are loaded in the server, to achieve a particular goal. Which means that I think we’ll see, in a year or two’s time, we’ll see full-blown enterprise platforms that can do anything you like, but actually start up a lot faster than what we have right now. I think the benefits such as versioning and hot deployment will be very important.

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   Big up

   by Lukas Zapletal

   To RJ and others.

   Reply

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   Good interview

   by Surya De

   Interesting to see the roadmap for Spring. Keep up these great interviews Infoq!

   Reply

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