The Spring framework emerged as a lightweight alternative to EJBs and heavy application servers and has been consistently growing in popularity. Spring creator Rod Johnson in a recent keynote has suggested that Java app servers are a dead technology.

SpringSource, the company behind Spring, today announced that job requirements for Spring continue to soar, with Spring overtaking Enterprise JavaBeans as an enterprise job requirement.

Since its inception, the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology has been a bit of an enigma. While almost all other Java/J2EE (now Java EE) technologies seem to be quite important, somehow knowing how to work with EJB has always been something to be proud about. If someone claims that she has experience in J2EE technologies only to discover that it excludes EJB, the experience in J2EE is more often than not considered as irrelevant.

Experts Debate SOA, RIA, Agile, Quality, Open Source, Work Cultures & IT Education…

Project managers & architects from Cognizant, Infosys, i-flex & Persistent talk about trends in software development. They discuss the changing nature of enterprise applications as well as the impact of RIA and SOA. They share their thoughts on Agile, project execution models, project irritants and also give their take on the quality of software education. Read the full discussion to gain meaningful insights into the Software Development scenario today.

I have been a NetBeans and JDeveloper user for many years. I have used Eclipse on and off but can’t say that I have ever adopted Eclipse as such. Recently downloaded the new NetBeans 6.1 beta and was impressed. I already had the latest JDeveloper and Eclipse on my machine.

Grails creator Graeme Rocher tells us what’s special about the web framework and how it offers developers the best of the Java and the scripting world.

He also talks of how Groovy and Grails complement Java and also when it would be madness to think of using a scripting language over a language like Java.