Johnson Is Much More Than a Technical Visionary
Email
Print
Soon after, Johnson became the angry
man of Java. Hed take every opportunity to diss EJBs and speak to usually
standing-room only audiences about the persistent problems with J2EE and his
resolutions. He also railed against the Java Community Process (JCP), at one
point comparing it to the commissar in Soviet Russia.
The best compliment I can give Rod
is that I personally observed him maintain his focus on his ideas and proposals
despite the pressures he received from the big vendors to align himself with
one or more of their competitive agendas, said Eric Newcomer, former chief
architect at Credit Suisse. It was this dedication to what he knew was right
that set him and SpringSource apart, and brought enterprise Java to a better
place. In fact, the Spring Framework won the hearts and minds battle instead
of one of the big vendors who had invested so much in competing with each other
that they sometimes lost sight of the developer's view.
Rod's greatest achievement was
incontestably to turn the massive EE ecosystem on its head and force a radical
evolution that eventually led to the emergence of EE6, said Sacha Labourey,
CEO of CloudBees and former CTO of JBoss. Java EE would never have reached
that level of simplicity and completeness if it hadn't been forced to fight back
the Spring threat.
The origins and evolution of Java
EE, especially EJBs, in the mid-to-late 1990s were as much shaped by the
political agreements among the leading Java vendors of the time as they were by
the technical and application requirements the specifications were designed to
meet, Newcomer, a mainstay in the standards process, explained. For example, at
the time EJB was proposed it was seen as the future of transaction processing
and distributed computing, to take over the market from C++ and the Common
Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). By now, however, it has been
broadly recognized that Java EE did not achieve all of its original goals, and
that it is too broad and too complex for most enterprise applications, Newcomer
said. Today, the need to subset and modularize the Java EE world is taken for
granted, but that was not always the case.
When Rod published his seminal book
and started SpringSource, best practices for Java EE were not well-understood,
since in some casesentity beans and OR [object-relational] mapping for examplethe
specifications did not truly achieve
their stated goals and it took some time for the industry to determine which
specifications had worked and which had not, Newcomer said. Meanwhile, the
major proponents of Java EE promoted it in its entirety virtually without
qualification or reservation. Today, the use of frameworks such as Spring and
abstractions such as dependency injection have been widely adopted, and the
innovations Spring pioneered to simplify Java EE have been incorporated into
recent versions of Java EE, as can be seen in particular in the JPA [Java
Persistence API] and EJB 3 specifications.
What Rod and SpringSource
demonstrated was that open source can out-innovate standards-led approaches
like the JCP, said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse
Foundation. In many ways, it was Spring that helped retain Java's relevance on
the server, because it arrived just in time to save Java developers from the
Java EE bloatware. Our own Eclipse developer survey shows that Spring is the
leading Java server framework, with more usage than either EJBs or servlets.
Rod was a pioneer in creating a developer-led community-based technology for
enterprise Java.
Spring has come a long way since its
launch. With its mission of simplification in mind, Spring has evolved to
address problems and integrate with systems well beyond the scope of the
original Spring Framework, Johnson said. That evolution continues today with
Spring-created technology at the forefront of enterprise development: Spring
for Apache Hadoop and Spring Integration help with big data distributed
processing problems; Spring Data simplifies access to NoSQL and distributed
data stores; Spring Social and Spring Mobile let developers build the critical
services to mobilize enterprise applications. While the Spring Framework
started during the heyday of the traditional monolithic enterprise Java application
server, todays world is very different: dominated by lightweight runtimes and
cloud platforms where Spring is still the best programming choice. The Spring
team is amazing and will continue to stay at the forefront of enterprise
development, including addressing the problems of enterprise big data, the rise
of multiple client platforms and around cloud computing.
On the VMware acquisition, merging
a middleware company with an infrastructure one isn't for the faint-hearted;
the DNA are simply not the same, Labourey said. Given this, and knowing that
Rod is more a small-company entrepreneur, his three-year tenure at VMW is a
good signal that shows that the SpringSource asset within VMW is safe and
will survive Rod's departure. VMW's objective when it acquired
SpringSource was to get access to what it was sorely lacking: enterprise
developers. With VMW's increased focus on the Cloud, SpringSource per se
becomes less sensitive and mainly acts as a tool used to convert developers to
the next-generation platform: the cloud.
Another of Johnsons qualities that
helped him succeed was his ability to align himself with good people and form a
formidable team. From Hoeller to his hire of aspect-oriented programming (AOP)
expert Adrian Colyer from IBM, to his hire of serial entrepreneur Neelan Choksi
and veteran business and engineering manager Peter Cooper-Ellis, among a host
of other top-notch talent, Johnson surrounded himself with strength at every
position.
"I suspect a lot of people will
talk about Rod's technical contributions to Java and the industry, said Neelan
Choksi, president and chief operating officer of Tasktop and former COO of
SpringSource. And yes, Rod contributed heavily to the industry with dependency
injection, AOP, inversion of control, etc. As COO of SpringSource through the
adolescent years of the company, I got to see Rod through a very different
lens. Rod is much more than a technical visionary. Less seen by the outside
world, I would actually argue that Rod's business acumen, strategic thinking,
and competitive fire may be his stronger suits. I recently reread the business
plan we wrote when we raised our Series A funding at SpringSource, and contrary
to the current thinking of Lean Startups and pivots, that original business
plan absolutely nailed what the company would do and what would make it
successful. Rod also helped push professional open source from the Wild West to
something that senior leaders in the largest, most conservative companies in
the world would be comfortable with. Most importantly, Rod was the heart of the
entire SpringSource organization and the inspirational leader of both the
technical and business people. Anyone who worked with Rod is better for it. So,
I am thrilled that my friend has chosen to close this chapter of his life and
look forward to seeing what he does next."
Indeed, those who worked with
Johnson at SpringSource when VMware acquired the company for $420 million in
2009 are better for it. Word is Johnson took care of his people. Not only
financially, but he also stood up for them against criticism. There was a time
when SpringSource and JBoss were at war, flaming each other on message boards
and TheServerSide.com. I can recall
interviews where Johnson literally had to bite his tongue or get up and pace
before answering questions that mentioned JBoss. The two companies were
competing not only in the marketplace, but also for their place in open-source
history. Now, Labourey and Bill Burke, two vehement JBossians, have posted
congratulations on Johnsons blog about his decision to leave VMware.
And Johnson leaves VMware under
solidly positive circumstances. Although he had long since felt his work in
integrating SpringSource into the VMware fold was done, VMwares top brass had
asked Johnson at least twice to remain in-houseto which he agreedbefore he
made the decision that he was going to call it quits.
Over the last decade, a small number
of open-source entrepreneursMarc Fleury from JBoss, Gavin King from Hibernate
and Rod Johnson from Springprobably had more impact on how Java is being
consumed in enterprises than any of the big software vendors out there,
Labourey told eWEEK.
Enough said. Hats off to Rod; you
made your mark, brother.
