[Springframework-developer] Spring/Geronimo

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

All

I recently met up with James Strachan, to discuss Spring/Geronimo
integration, among other things. Btw James has recently joined us as a
Spring developer--he's a great addition to our team!

Spring/Geronimo integration is an exciting prospect, and we should
prioritize anything we need to do towards it.

The Geronimo team plan to give Spring a deployment unit, supported in
Geronimo like an EJB Jar file etc. James has been working on
this. This involves (a) Spring having a deployment unit that Geronimo
recognizes and gives its own class loader; (b) Geronimo trying to expose
Spring beans via JMX.

So we need to define a Spring deployment unit. This should presumably be a
JAR that contains:
- application classes
- one or more XML files
- manifest giving location and order of XML files
- manifest classpath expressing dependencies as normal
- ? some mechanism for indicating dependencies, such as DataSources. It
would be good to be able to fail fast, rather than when the app tries to
start up.

James is happy to implement support in Geronimo for any definition format we
choose. Let's start thinking! We can no doubt leverage such a deployment
unit outside Geronimo also...

Geronimo will ship the Spring binaries itself. And it uses CGLIB heavily and
(I assume) Commons Logging/Log4j. So it would be nice to be able to drop in
a Spring deployment unit and just have it start up.

There may also be integration possibilities with transaction
management--getting access to lower-level details of transaction management
than is available via JTA. I've opened a discussion on this with Jeremy
Boynes.

Rgds
Rod