Via Greg, some interesting adoption data on Spring vs. EJB. Of course Rod Johnson (Springsource CEO and Spring inventor) is anything but unbiased on this. I haven’t seen any corroboration of his data but it is consistent with the zeitgeist. Greg’s take on what it means for standards is interesting too. I think what he says is especially true for standards that target portability (like J2EE and SCA) versus those that target interoperability. Standardization (including de-facto) is a must for a protocol but a “nice to have” for a development framework. But then again, now that even IT management has BarCamps, maybe even boring IT management interoperability protocols could emerge from the bottom up.
Eventually the market will force standardization to ensure the multitude of products using such a popular framework do not break each other and that resource management is much more efficient especially for exotic runtimes. The core principles and concepts need to be fully supported within the JVM runtime to achieve this on a realistic scale across different products and up and down the stack and not just within web applications as spring is used most commonly today. There is already movements to address this with the WebBeans specification which hopefully will be expanded in scope to address similar requirements outside web applications. Of course the buyout of SpringSource by say Oracle would create an even more immediate need for a standard to be defined and adopted which is something the team has not really publicly engaged in until now with the Java EE profiles.
William