This month Fronde is pleased to announce the partnership of Fronde and SpringSource. Fronde has a number of partnerships, but that does not mean to say we are free and easy. We choose our partners carefully, with a primary criterion of “will this be good for our customers?”
People who know both SpringSource and Fronde will immediately understand why we have partnered with them. For those who don’t, you might instantly stop reading once I tell you who they are because it might sound geeky and unimportant at the business level. Hopefully, you are still reading and in return I will keep the geek element of this post to a minimum (enough so I can explain what this is all about) and will focus on why this is good for our customer’s business.
Who are SpringSource?
SpringSource are the company behind the open source Java framework Spring. Frameworks make software development much easier and arguably Spring is the Java framework that has proved to make software development that much easier.
Why is SpringSource good for our customers…
The first thing that will occur to those that are business minded is that frameworks mean reduced risk, complexity, and ultimately cost; and you would be right. If we take it as a given that any well-written framework can do this, then you might ask… what else does Spring and SpringSource bring that another framework and partnership would not?
In computing we use the term ‘maintainability’ to describe the type of rewarding characteristics that a framework should bring. However, maintainability also goes beyond what a framework can deliver and is about ensuring that the life of a product is long and rewarding; that changes are easy to make; that it is easy to find and train people in how your system is put together; and that the products that it relies on are well supported, kept current and up to date. Spring and SpringSource are about this wider definition of maintainability.
SpringSource is about finding the right people
The following graph is from Indeed.com. Indeed.com searches millions of jobs from thousands of job sites. (Not NZ sites I will concede, but I think we can often look at oversaes trends as applicable to our own country). In addition to finding people jobs, this site also lets you create these trend graphs.
The line to note is the “spring and java developer” line which has been trending up (note 0.2 is 20%). The point here is that Spring software development skills are increasingly easier to find. Internally at Fronde most Java software developers have undergone Spring training and/or have hands on experience with Spring. When hiring we find that many candidates also have Spring experience and are attracted to an organisation that uses Spring. The win/win/win here is: we find it easy to hire; the candidate gets to work for a company that is using the technology that they like; and our customers get a more maintainable system built.
SpringSource is about utilising technology correctly
Some of you may have looked at the graph above and agreed with my observation, but may have noted that the Spring line competes with the Tomcat (Apache), WebLogic (BEA, Oracle), JBoss (Red Hat), Websphere (IBM), and Glassfish (Sun, Oracle). If these are technologies of choice in your organisation then do not fear, Spring is not competing but complementing your existing investment.
Spring works with Tomcat, WebLogic, JBoss, WebSphere, Glassfish, your-choice-of-Java-container
Spring built systems can be deployed to all of these containers. Furthermore, many Spring systems may only rely on a handful of the features that these containers provide. This makes porting between them easier and cheaper. Knowing this, we can look at the graph again and understand that skills are NOT an either/or choice; people do not have to have either Glassfish or Spring skills; instead there are likely to be many people with both. This further increases the size of the recruitment pool.
It is worth noting here that Spring has a strong relationship with Apache’s Tomcat. Tomcat is also open source and free, and has always been a very popular container for Web, Java systems. Spring and Tomcat are an excellent combination because Spring provides many features often associated with fully fledged application servers (which Tomcat is not), so Spring, together with Tomcat, provides a lightweight and fully open source solution. (Spring staff members are also the main contributors to the Tomcat product, as well as being contributors to other Apache products including HTTPD, and ActiveMQ that are often also included in a solution’s stack).
SpringSource is about Support
Open Source naysayers will associate the term with “no support”. This is the furtherest thing from the truth with Spring and SpringSource. Better still, you get to choose the support model that best works for your business requirements, budget, and a range of support tools should you wish, including:
- Spring as an open source product is available free and, as the graph above demonstrates, is popular and increasingly so. Major releases are made available to the community by SpringSource and the community of software developers, including your own developers, are free to make changes to the source to meet your needs.
- SpringSource offer an Enterprise Edition that gives you added support if you need it. See the SpringSource web site for more details, but, in essence, it moves support into the same zone as you might expect from traditional product vendors. The Enterprise Edition also has enhancements and add-ons that might be attractive to large NZ enterprises.
- In addition to the Enterprise Edition are other SpringSource licensed products that can further enhance the support of your system. tc Server and AMS enable runtime monitoring and management of Spring systems, Tomcat containers, and a choice of operating system to run Spring on. Being able to create alerts and correlate events between the different parts of a entire runtime environment is a useful tool to have in a support arsenal.
- And, if that wasn’t enough, SpringSource recently acquired Hyperic which further enhances monitoring and management capabilities.
SpringSource, more…
I could go on about Spring and SpringSource as there is a lot more to it, but I will be in danger of entering the geek zone, which I promised to avoid here. If you do want to learn more I am happy to answer comments! Of course you can also visit the SpringSource web site at www.springsource.com.
SpringSource and Fronde
Fronde has chosen SpringSource as a partner because we believe that it makes good sense for our customers. We are proud that SpringSource, a leader in Java technology, has chosen to reciprocate and has selected Fronde as their first New Zealand partner. If you have any further questions about Spring, SpringSource, or Fronde’s Java capability, then please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me or anyone at Fronde.
[...] as to why this partnership is useful for Fronde’s customers in Paul Armstrong’s blog post Spring in May @ Fronde. Also on the blogs agile methodologies continue to create interest and a little heat. In Scrum 101 [...]