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Interface21, the company behind the open-source Spring Framework, is changing its name to SpringSource.
Rod Johnson, CEO and founder of the San Mateo, Calif., company, said in a Nov. 18 blog post that the company has “evolved naturally to SpringSource. We are not making a fuss about it. It just makes so much sense for us to use the name thats so close to what people naturally (and almost accidentally) use. Its simply confusing to have a name thats unnaturally distanced from the product we created and drive. Our tagline has always been Spring from the Source, making it easy to see what the new name should be. “
Johnson said that when he founded Interface21 in 2004, he saw the Spring Framework as the future of enterprise Java. “Interface21 reflected those feelings—the framework for the 21st Century. Now were well into the 21st Century,” he said. “Spring has proven to be more successful than I could have dreamed, and has become a de facto standard for enterprise Java. Its also growing in popularity on the .Net platform. Millions worldwide have downloaded Spring Portfolio products.”
Early in November, Interface21 announced the release candidate 1.0 of the Spring Framework 2.5.
“The single biggest theme is to further increase the benefits we take from Java 5 and Java 6,” Johnson told eWEEK in an interview. “We continue to run on J2EE [Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition] 1.4 and above.”
The newest version also added support for annotations, using the source-level annotations feature from Java 5, he said.
Other Spring 2.5 features include: annotation-driven dependency injection; support for component scanning in the classpath; further XML configuration namespaces; a completely revised framework for integration tests; and officially certified WebSphere support in conjunction with IBM, Johnson said.
“Particularly worth mentioning are the annotation-based MVC [model-view-controller] controller style, the JAX-WS [Java API for XML Web Services] support and the TestNG support,” said Juergen Hoeller, co-founder of the Spring Framework project and Interface21.
Johnson said the companys philosophy about Spring is that “no one size fits all, so we provide the maximum degree of flexibility.”
Neville R. “Roy” Singham, founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, said the majority of ThoughtWorks developers who do Java work prefer lightweight enterprise Java solutions such as Spring over Java Enterprise Edition-based tools.
“Our developers want to use the latest and greatest tools, processes and languages to enable them to get the job done faster and better,” Singham said.
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