Will the BEA Acquisition Push Spring Framework?
Alternative stacks may gain more attention in response to Oracle's acquisition of BEA
BEA is well known for its J2EE application server Weblogic and recently extended its product line to a SOA stack branded Liquid. Oracle has its own J2EE compontents mainly derived from Orion Server and branded as OC4J. They also have a SOA stack called Fusion.
So you might ask what the future of these products will be.
Oracle already acquired three different business application suites in the past: J. D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel. Does it make sense to develop three different product lines of business application suites and at least two different product lines of Java EE and SOA middleware? Probably not.
This uncertain future may make companies reevaluate their current technology stack for middleware applications. They will notice that there is an alternative beyond the IBM Websphere dinosaur and JBoss which is now RedHat. The alternative is Apache Tomcat and Spring Framework mixed with some Terracotta if you need distributed shared data.
Spring basically allows you to assemble your own application server. Transaction management, security, remoting, O/R mapping, clustering – just add what you need when you need it. Basically there is not much left where Spring does not offer a proven solution. On the other hand the features where commercial J2EE servers have been strong in the past (compared to other stacks) are becoming less important:
- EJB remoting will be replaced by web services
- entity bean style O/R mapping has already been replaced by Hibernate (where EJB3 tries to catch on)
- load distribution and fail-over is easy in a world of HTTP or JMS based web services
- clustering of data is less important in the stateless world of services
In the end the uncertainty caused by Oracle's acquisition of BEA could very well further increase the growth of Spring and the open source components it makes so easy to combine.