The Spring Experience 2007: Day 1

The name of the Spring conference underlines the spirit of the event: it's all about the experience. The experience of listening to the very folks that are behind what is probably the biggest innovation in the Java space since, well, Java itself. The experience of meeting other like minded professionals who are passionate about technology and who have first hand experience with Java entreprise systems. Every person I've talked to so far is highly excited about the changes that Spring technology brings to their organisation and systems. A lot have "been there", that is, going through the pain of traditional J2EE development and the inevitable loss of faith in design by committee specifications.

The first two sessions I attended where on Enterprise Integration patterns and the speaker, Mark Fisher, gave an excellent overview of integration patterns in Spring. The big surprise, for me, was the announcement of the Spring Integration API during the second session. Mark went through the upcoming message oriented integration API that will be part of the Spring portfolio. With an expected final release in Q2 2008, and a milestone in January, it looks like SpringSource is aggressively moving into the ESB/SOA space. Given the penetration of Mule in that space (which is playing nicely with Spring) it will be interesting to see how the two positions themselves with respect to each other.

The Spring Integration API is directly relevant to the work we've been doing on our internal integration platform in the recent weeks. I've had a chance to catch up with Mark in the afternoon and explained what framework we put in place. The Spring Integration API aims to provide an out of the box messaging framework for SOA. It is not really following the JBI "standard" (another EJB-esque design by committee spec). It is more in line with the no nonsense integration framework that Mule is. Looking at the API during the session, I could see how easy it would be to migrate our framework (which is Spring based) to it. So we'll definitely be watching that space.

The first afternoon session I attended was on Data Access & I/O Strategies for Batch Processing which included in the end a small introduction to Spring Batch. Quite a good session and relevant to us considering batching is another area where we had to put in place our home brew architecture.

I was going to attend the next session on Spring Batch Introduction however Rod Johnson's session on the State of the Art in Dependency Injection proved too tempting. Listening to the man himself on the history of the DI side of the Spring framework and other competing frameworks was fascinating. The Java Configuration annotation based project was also covered and it showed a good alternative to the traditional XML configuration (I don't like the normal annotation-based configuration as it is class bound and not instance bound).

To sum up, a very satisfying first day with very relevant topics.