SpringSource to stop providing maintenance releases for free

Is this possibly the latest Java community buzz? SpringSource Announces Enterprise Maintenance Policy.

Mats Henricson asks What is SpringSource doing with its license? and while the SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy FAQ states that there is no license change, the SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy sure is a change. They summarize it quite consise themselves:

After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues.  Subsequent maintenance releases will be available to SpringSource Enterprise customers. Bug fixes will be folded into the open source development trunk and will be made available in the next major community release of the software.

Entity bean bloat

I’m currently getting acquainted with JBoss, SpringSource Application Platform, JBoss Seam and Spring Framework.

One thing that amazes me is the amount of code required for some simple O/R mapping, or I am missing something? I hope to be wrong about this, but it seems like an EJB3 "entity bean" requires, for each column in a database, the following items written and maintained:

  • a private member variable
  • a getter method
  • a setter method

As I have some Ruby on Rails experience, where inheriting from ActiveRecord gives you those things out-of-the-box, I am amazed of the sheer amount of boilerplate code needed in Java for the same thing! I asked a friend wih ZendFramework knowledge about how it worked there, and it seems like Zend_Db_Table_Abstract works just like ActiveRecord.

I can’t be the first one perplexed by this, especially not when the development guide for the ASM 3.0 Java bytecode engineering library contains exactly the above parts as an example of generating bytecode! (See section 3.1.3.)