Saturday, May 3, 2008

SpringSource Application platform

Lately, several Spring based platforms for application development has arisen. I guess this is a good thing. JEE is a quite rigid and restrictive for modern application development. There are areas were this is good. For example in conservative industries code may live for 10-15 years. So well described standardized platform is a must.

But as I said it has drawback. This is why Spring is the leading framework for application development. It is like LEGO. The framework ties together many different components into a single system and provides unprecedented flexibility in architecture design. In the last two java projects of mine JEE container was just for checkbox. Mostly all functionality is controlled and managed by Spring.

So introduction of the Application Platform by SpringSource is a GREAT EVENT for me! While the platform is on early stages of development yet, it tends to be a great tool!
  • All components are physically modularized through OSGI. So version control and dependency resolution is inside container already. These things I was doing manually for ages.
  • Logging is fantastic! The platform separates event streams by originating application and allows to configure details level very precisely. The configuration language is much simpler and comfortable than Log4j XML. Moreover, serious app errors are detected and logged (deadlock & etc).
  • The platform provides native support for Spring contexts, modules linking through Spring DM. I am happy. :-))))
However, the platform is young still. I did a quick review and got following wishes:
  • The platform need a bundle distribution infrastructure. I want not put new bundles into all instances manually. Of course, I can automate this. But it would be better to have the feature inside the AP.
  • I'd like to have Tanuki software wrapper as native runner instead of custom made shell scripts. The wrapper is broadly used by community and it provides very good capabilities for OS integration (services, remote restart, watchdog & etc)
Anyway, this is a big step forward for server application development. You are on good course Spring!
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3 comments:

Rob Harrop said...

Alexey,

Thanks for your comments.

We do have support for sharing bundles across multiple versions of the Platform, we just need to polish it and document it. Watch out for a blog entry coming from Andy Wilkinson next week that details how to do this.

We had also considered using the Java Service Wrapper but there seemed to be little interest from people we asked ;) If you'd like to create a JIRA request for this at http://issuetracker.springsource.com, we'll certainly consider adding it.

Regards,

Rob Harrop

01:06
Gurney said...

Rob,

thank you for the update. I'll be watching on the project.

I've posted a feature request to the JIRA, btw. :-)

01:34
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05:25

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