[Springframework-developer] Spring.NET

[Rod J. <rod...@in...>]

Mark Pollack and I would like to announce the Spring Framework .NET. This
project is currently in the planning stage, but Mark has already set up the
SF project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/springnet/) and we are
discussing strategy on the project mailing list. We're aiming for an initial
release of the basic IoC container, followed by AOP, followed by some
enterprise services. Of course many of the "enterprise services" appropriate
to .NET will be different from those relevant to J2EE. But the benefits of a
lightweight framework still apply. The implementation language will be C#.

I've been thinking about a .NET port of Spring for a while, and Mark started
some work last year. The immediate catalyst was an article by Sami Jaber on
dotnetguru, discussing Spring and other lightweight containers from the
viewpoint of .NET developers:
http://www.dotnetguru.org/us/articles/ioc/ioc.html?POSTNUKESID=11265df57d0ba
. (The article was originally written in French and this isn't a great
translation, so if you read French, go to the original at
http://www.dotnetguru.org/articles/dossiers/ioc/ioc.htm.) Sami's article
points out the value proposition regarding transaction management--as well
as the obvious IoC and AOP.

We feel that ideas from Spring can provide real value to .NET development.
The
existence of a .NET version of Spring will also be very helpful to the
significant number of developers who work on both platforms.

So: If you would like to volunteer, please speak up! So far we have 4
developers. Mark will be the project lead. We aim to apply the values that
have proven themselves so useful
in the J2EE project, especially TDD. It's vital that any project bearing the
Spring Framework name should meet our high quality standards.

I shouldn't need to say this, because religious disputes about platforms are
plain silly, but rest assured that:
- This will not distract from the focus on Spring J2EE
- No sale of souls is involved

Note btw that PicoContainer already has a .NET port, although I'm not sure
how far it's kept up to date. Of course, Pico covers only a fraction of the
scope of Spring, so a .NET version of Spring is a much greater challenge.

Regards,
Rod