The Father of Spring
We had the pleasure of attending a SpringSource seminar this AM (Spring Ireland 2008) being sponsored by the good people at kainos.
Upon arrival I must admit we were a little bleary eyed, 7:30 registration is early by anybody’s standards, but as I scanned the ornately decorated Banking Hall of the Westin I soon realised we were not the only ones. After a frantic rush to the coffee stand and a revitalising mug of black java (no pun intended) we were ready to absorb all the OpenSource Java information that was to be thrown at us - well almost….
The guest speaker was none other than Rod Johnson (no jokes please!) - the self titled “Father of Spring” and author of the bestseller Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. The first half of Ron’s address turned out to be very interesting, primarily highlighting the benefits of open source software over the monolithic software packages available to purchase from the usual suspects. I personally liked the point made by Ron stating that for any open source software to survive it HAS to provide something innovative and useful, whereas a product released by a corporate entity can survive based on the economic backing of said entity - regardless of any additional functionality it may or may not provide. Fairly obvious when you think about it, but nevertheless very true.
The second half of the seminar started to drag for us a little. Not sure whether that was due to the content or the coffee wearing off. Now, I am not naive enough to believe that the whole seminar was solely for the benfit of Java users and was purely for informative purposes - however it did seem a little too heavy on the sales and promotion of Spring. By the end of it we got the distinct feeling that what we were being told was a little contradictory ie. Open source is great, provided it is being partnered by a corporate entity. Not sure whether that is what those great developers slaving over their pc’s putting together fantastic code for the benefit of the end user at little or no cost had in mind…..
