Rod Johnson has an SMD moment
JRod is in the house! Matt Asay linked to my post on Spring Source earlier today echoing the sentiment of "how is this an application server?" He thereby attracted the wrath of the Rod.
Rod, I know you have a hard-on for JBoss, but keep your sprocket in your pocket. Funny how somebody with the personality of a cold cucumber sandwich suddenly finds his picante! Later in the thread the man lashes out at a Spring user for saying "this is not an app-server, why should I pay you for Spring?"
You haven't been in OSS any time at all if you haven't felt the urge to lash out at a customer, er user who refuses to pay his protection money, and that's the point. Open Source is a bitch. I sympathize. At JBoss, we called this the SMD moment.
Rod is wrong on a couple of things: I DO understand the technology enough to call it out for what it is "an emperor has no clothes" attempt to monetize his ISV base. I will respectfully point out that all this mumbo jumbo about modularity being a "quantum leap to the next generation" is just bullshit. We were peddling modular application servers with JBoss and its JMX base back in 2000, except we had real run-time substance behind it. This is almost 10 years old. We are looking at Tomcat and Hibernate (both from JBoss developers) with Spring, a modular kernel and a little bit of marketing bullshit sauce on top. What is new is the licensing gimmick. Licensing schmicensing. Your users are not dumb, they see right through this flat footed license change, don't get mad and patronize them when they call you out.
He got one thing right, though. I am becoming irrelevant to the industry. I have no troops to command any longer, I just write this blog. On the other hand, I did have the good taste to become irrelevant AFTER I exited the industry.
Matt: I just don't understand why it's an application server. I'm probably too ignorant to appreciate the applicability of the nomenclature, but to me it doesn't fit.
Rod: Indeed, you do not understand. It is an application server because it provides a complete runtime environment that is an alternative to existing application server products. Spring is a part of it. It's sad to see you quoting the bitter FUD of Marc Fleury. He also doesn't understand the technology enough at this point to comment; he clearly has a vested interest in attacking SpringSource; and he's irrelevant to the future of the industry. Rgds Rod
Rod, I know you have a hard-on for JBoss, but keep your sprocket in your pocket. Funny how somebody with the personality of a cold cucumber sandwich suddenly finds his picante! Later in the thread the man lashes out at a Spring user for saying "this is not an app-server, why should I pay you for Spring?"
You haven't been in OSS any time at all if you haven't felt the urge to lash out at a customer, er user who refuses to pay his protection money, and that's the point. Open Source is a bitch. I sympathize. At JBoss, we called this the SMD moment.
Rod is wrong on a couple of things: I DO understand the technology enough to call it out for what it is "an emperor has no clothes" attempt to monetize his ISV base. I will respectfully point out that all this mumbo jumbo about modularity being a "quantum leap to the next generation" is just bullshit. We were peddling modular application servers with JBoss and its JMX base back in 2000, except we had real run-time substance behind it. This is almost 10 years old. We are looking at Tomcat and Hibernate (both from JBoss developers) with Spring, a modular kernel and a little bit of marketing bullshit sauce on top. What is new is the licensing gimmick. Licensing schmicensing. Your users are not dumb, they see right through this flat footed license change, don't get mad and patronize them when they call you out.
He got one thing right, though. I am becoming irrelevant to the industry. I have no troops to command any longer, I just write this blog. On the other hand, I did have the good taste to become irrelevant AFTER I exited the industry.
Comments
If so, isn't Equinox EPL software? How can that be repackaged as GPL? Check the GPL FAQ.
Good thing, OSGi is not an important part of this and can be left out.
There are other implementations of OSGi besides eclipse, there is JBoss MC :) This way they can get Tomcat, Hibernate, JBossMC, call it Spring and be done with this bullshit.
The app server to which you can deploy your apps as an OSGi bundle is BEA WebLogic Event Server. It is also based on OSGi (Equinox) and Spring-DM (though the servlet engine is Jetty). I hope BEA will extend their micro-Service Architecture (OSGi-based) and expose it in regular WebLogic Server. I am sure most of the established app servers will do the same in a 3-6 months timeframe. Then the advantage of Spring App Server will dissapear. As somebody wrote on TSS: it will be again like comparing Tomcat to WebLogic...
One night, I am in London, this is 2002? It is 3AM I am drunk after a dinner with the second EU training. I come to my room, there is a message from my wife, she informs me that she is pregnant with twins. Then I read my email.
This guy, called Trawick James, is complaining that we are charging $10 for our documentation! $10 freaking dollars!!!! He worked at Nielsen Media Research so clearly could afford BEA yet was there lecturing us about how this "was not open source and we were going to fail".
The only response I could muster that late at night was:
"Mr Trawick James,
Suck my d*ck,
marcf"
Of course, it made the rounds, first by the competition, which spread this saying "this is what you get for free!" I woke up the next morning thinking "ooops". Then it became an inside joke at JBoss used to describe that moment where you reach the point where you are really really tired of the "free" in free software. It really gets to you. Our sales force would reach these moments after an initial period of euphoria. I remember this guy writing "when I read "there are synergies between our companies" I know they don't want to pay. Today someone talked about "extreme synergies" I knew it was time to run". Which was a PG13 version of the SMD moment for sales guys.
We had to innovate all kinds of cool shit to get Hibernate sessions running inside Guice. It's a new technology you have never heard of: I call it the ThreadLocal.
Dhanji. =P
I actually think you feel threatened. In the past few years JBoss has been talking a lot about standalone JBoss MC - a platform which was supposed to address development and deployment of POJO based systems without dependency on JBoss API while maintaining component architecture to assemble other platforms (e.g. JEE). Generally I'd say not a bad idea. . . You already had almost that with current JMX Micro container and SAR based services. All you needed to do is achieve non-invacivenes.
However, since JBoss didn't have non-invasive and configurable POJO based application framework you had to start working on your own and with JBoss's complex of superiority you could not possibly use somebody else's. . . As for the runtime core, OSGi was also not considered, but now, since you can no longer deny its importance you are working on providing modules to address OSGi class loading model and integration. But still, you decided not to take on any of the existing OSGi implementations for such core, motivating JBoss's decision as "The current OSGi service registry lacks the features we need. . ." - understood. And if you were to commit to one ". . . it would probably take the same amount of effort, if not more, to put everything together . . ." (see JBoss MC interview). - Well I guess it is nice to know that Spring has better engineers, because they did just that and they did it faster then it takes JBoss to release version 5 which was promised Q2 2006 . . . (I still have the slides. . .). They also did it based on standard (OSGi) that actually makes sense while also taking existing implementation (Equinox), while JBoss MC as proprietary as it gets. . . so who is the hypocrite here?
So, what you really tried to do looks ironically similar to what Spring has actually done and basically beat you to the punch, and now with fully featured run-time environment, completely overtaken the lead role in terms of Enterprise Java innovation. And all you left with is being as colorful in your attitude and language as you've always been. And God bless you Mark, by being so colorful you've contributed to more loss business for JBoss then any competitor could ever dream off, so please remain the way you are and don't change a thing.
Casual Blogger
JBoss certified JEMS Master Architect and Instructor - who no longer cares
You must mistake me with someone STILL involved with Red Hat. I left a few years ago with a lot more than "my attitude". It is funny how so many people are still upset about it all.
You are right that AS5 is taking longer than it should have.
Please remember that Tomcat, Hibernate are JBoss products. The packaging in OSGi is irrelevant and this is only a license change play. THEY think you are a sucker.
"you could not possibly use somebody else's"
We would have used somebody else's if it did what we want it to do.
You seem to miss the idea of MC.
It's not just about POJOs, it's about any component model, any environment out there.
If you can find me any other framework/kernel that does what we do in MC, I'll change my statement.
Look at MC homepage, all its sub-projects, and let me know who does something similar.
And no, it's not Spring and their new SSAP toy. ;-)
"Well I guess it is nice to know that Spring has better engineers, because they did just that and they did it faster"
This is what you do when you don't have anything - no existing runtime env or legacy things. Then you do what you're good at, wrapping around existing solutions and spread some fud how anything else is obsolete.
OSGi is nice, but it again doesn't do all one needs when you're writting app server. You can either hack around or do things how they should be done. And we chose the 2nd option.
What we have in MC regarding dependency control, ease of use of classloaders, deployment flexibility with new deployers, VFS, ... It's so beyond any OSGi out there, it's the likes of you who don't care about to look under the hood and just complain how we don't care about anything else.
It's just the opposite, with MC we're giving out again something completely new - a very much enhanced kernel. Probably something that everybody is gonna copy like they did previous MicroKernel. ;-)
"while JBoss MC as proprietary as it gets"
Where do you see the usage of MC?
You're again missing the point.
MC is completely transparent for the user. Even when you're constructing your own runtime on top of MC, mostly you don't see MC.
Like any good framework it exposes the hooks but not internals. And we make very sure we expose just what's needed and hide the impl details behind the right modifiers.
And the separation of artifacts is as clean as it gets; spi, api and plugins. Meaning you can change the impl at any time.
Again, you don't care to look, just complain and making yourself look like a prophet on who's leading the innovation.
Anonymous Master JBoss Architect,
I think what Ales meant to say was "SMD"!
;-)