Spring App Server
I've just seen the annoucement that SpringSource has launched a new App Server based on OSGi (Spring-DM).
I find it a bit weird that they tend to rewrite existing stuff: the JMS JCA layer in Spring 2.x is somehow derived from the Jencks project, Spring Integration looks a lot like Camel, and now this app server which looks very similar to ServiceMix Kernel with WAR support (which we already had in ServiceMix 4 from the Pax Web project).
I find it a bit weird that they tend to rewrite existing stuff: the JMS JCA layer in Spring 2.x is somehow derived from the Jencks project, Spring Integration looks a lot like Camel, and now this app server which looks very similar to ServiceMix Kernel with WAR support (which we already had in ServiceMix 4 from the Pax Web project).
Comments
Spring 2.5's JMS JCA support is technically an extension of Spring's generic JCA 1.5 support (GenericMessageEndpointManager), providing support for any kind of JCA compatible messaging - and special support for JMS on top (JmsMessageEndpointManager). The JMS-specific part is actually pretty minimal there; the heavy lifting is done in Spring's generic JCA support. The primary goal is consistency with Spring's native JMS setup style, exposed side-by-side in Spring 2.5's "jms" namespace.
Jencks on the other hand is JMS-centric for its inbound messaging support, as well as very Geronimo-oriented - with hard-coded Geronimo API dependencies all over the codebase. This is fine for its purpose, of course, which is primarily to marry ActiveMQ with Geronimo's JCA container in a standalone fashion. However, it is very different from Spring 2.5's goal which is compatibility with any JCA backend infrastructure (closely aligned with core Spring facilities).
Juergen
Glyn