Will Rod Johnson be the next Marc Fleury?

Yesterday VMware announced it is going to acquire SpringSource for around $420 million. They expect the deal to be closed in Q3 2009. This means not only acquiring the Spring framework, but also Groovy, Grails, SpringSource tc Server (Apache Tomcat), SpringSource dm Server, Roo, etc.

As a Java developer I'm making use of a lot of SpringSource products (Spring framework, Groovy, Grails) so I'm wondering what this will mean for us. The VMware blog stated that the Spring framework (and I assume the same counts for the other products) will stay open and that Rod Johnson will continue to lead SpringSource. Let's hope Rod will not go on a "Paternity Leave" like Marc Fleury did ;-)

I think a lot of attention will go to cloud computing. Both the VMware blog and SpringSource Team Blog speak a lot about it. To quote Rod Johnson: "Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds". Also Graeme Rocher (Head of Grails Development - SpringSource) tweeted that we can expect exciting developments around Grails + Cloud coming in the not too distant future.



The VMware SpringSource acquisition also means my latest prophecy that Oracle will buy SpringSource someday needs a slight change... I think Oracle will buy VMware someday.

The prophecy has come true! SpringSource next?

This aftenoon I received an e-mail from an old colleague that the Prophecy has come true (he was calling me Morpheus ;-): Oracle announced it entered into an agreement to acquire Sun.

Cool that just 1 month ago I finally blogged about this! I was thinking about this for years. I guess Mr. Larry Ellison had finally found my personal blog then ;-)

But seriously, what will this merger mean for us Java developers and for IT industry in general? In the past Oracle and Sun were very complementary, but the last years they became competitors also. Think about Sun acquiring MySQL and Oracle acquiring BEA Systems (including it's J2EE BEA WebLogic application server).

I guess Oracle will try to keep Java adopted as much as possible (it's in their own interest), but I don't think this will count for MySQL and GlassFish. I guess we will see a lot of other products being merged in the future, like NetBeans and JDeveloper. Time will tell, but it will definitely have some impact!

I will end with some new prophecies:

• Within 2 years Grails will be the leading platform for Java web development.


• Groovy will be the most dominant dynamic language on the JVM (Uhhhh, actually I don't think this is a prophecy but reality already).


• By 2012 a lot of Java developers are using Groovy without even knowing they are actually using Groovy.


• Someday Oracle will buy SpringSource.


• Very soon there will be a nice Groovy module for easily developing small Google App Engine applications.