08.19.09
SpringSource: Back to our regularly scheduled program
With the ink not yet dry on VMware’s offer to buy SpringSource, it’s time for SpringSource to get back to its regularly scheduled program. That happened to be SpringSource’s unveiling of the Cloud Foundry developer preview: This was the announcement that SpringSource was going to get out before the program got interrupted by the wheels of finance.
Cloud Foundry, a recent SpringSource acquisition, brings SpringSource’s evolution from niche technology to lightweight stack provider full circle. Just as pre-Red Hat JBoss was considered a light weight alternative to WebSphere and WebLogic, SpringSource is positioning itself as a kinder and gentler alternative to the growing JBoss-Red Hat stack. And that’s where the VMware connection comes into play, but more about that later.
The key of course is that SpringSource rides on the popularity of the Spring framework around which the company was founded. The company claims the Spring framework now shows up in roughly half of all Java installations. Its success is attributable to the way that Spring simplifies deployment to Java EE. But as popular as the Spring framework is, as an open source company, SpringSource monetizes only a fraction of al Spring framework deployments. So over the past few years it has been surrounding the framework with a stack of lightweight technologies that complement it, encompassing the:
• Tomcat servlet container (a lightweight Java server) and the newer DM server that is based on OSGi technology.
• Hyperic as the management stack;
• Groovy and Grails, which provides dynamic scripting that is native to the JVM, and an accompanying framework to make Groovy programming easy; and
• Cloud Foundry, which provided SpringSource the technology to mount its offerings in the cloud.
From a mercenary standpoint, putting all the pieces out in a cloud enables SpringSource to more thoroughly monetize the open source assets that otherwise gain revenue stream through support subscriptions.
But in another sense, you could consider the SpringSource’s Cloud Foundry as the Java equivalent of what Microsoft plans to do with Azure. In both cases, the goal is Platform-as-a-Service offerings based on familiar technology (Java, .NET) that can run in and outside the cloud. Microsoft calls it Software + Services. What both also have in common is that they are still in preview and not likely to go GA until next year.
But beyond the fact that SpringSource’s offering is Java-based, the combination with VMware adds yet a more basic differentiator. While Microsoft Azure is an attempt to preserve the Windows and Microsoft Office franchise, when you add VMware to the mix, the goal on SpringSource’s side is to make the OS irrelevant.
There are other intriguing possibilities with the link to VMware such as the possibility that some of the principles of the Spring framework (e.g., dependency injection, which abstract dependencies so developers don’t have to worry about writing all the necessary configuration files) might be applied to managing virtualization, which untamed, could become quite a beast to manage. And as we mentioned last week in the wake of the VMware announcement, SpringSource could do with some JVM virtualization so that each time you need to stretch the processing of Java objects., that you don’t have to blindly sprawl out another VM container.