While attending BEA's general session yesterday, I fully expected that I would hear all about the proprietary features that differentiated Weblogic from the rest of the J2EE container crowd. Of course that's part of what I heard, but Chief Technology Officer Mark Carges also discussed issues that Enterprise developers have been struggling with since J2EE was first released. Mark, pointed out that the Open Source community is pointing the way to a kinder more gentle J2EE development strategy. Features like:
POJO - Simplify enterprise development by using plain old Java objects.
Dependency Injection - Support for inversion of control, where the container provides the resource instead of requiring the component to wire the resource in. Dependencies are resolved declaratively, simplifying code and unit testing. Supports test driven development.
Meta Data - The ability to leverage annotations for inline meta data to avoid seperate XML descriptor file proliferation.
AOP - leverage Aspect Oriented Programming to support seperation of concerns and simplify implementation of cross-cutting concerns.
I then expected Mark to announce a new BEA product that would address this... or at lease reposition an old one. But to my supprise, he announced that BEA will formally begin to support a set of Open Source Frameworks. The Spring strategic partnership is the first strategic anouncment.
