"Organizations now have a choice that reduces the complexity associated with legacy Java EE servers," said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson yesterday as his company attempted to redefine the application server market by releasing the SpringSource Application Platform, an enterprise Java application server that Johnson contends provides "a dramatically simpler alternative to legacy application servers and redefines the way in which Java applications are deployed and run."

“The future of enterprise Java is clear and bright, with leaner, more powerful solutions increasingly being used in both development and production,” Johnson continued. "The SpringSource Application Platform, comprised of the dm-Kernel we developed, along with the proven Spring, Eclipse Equinox and Apache Tomcat technologies inside, provides the industry with the leanest, most flexible server for running enterprise Java applications," he added.

“To date, Java developers have had two choices for deploying web applications: Java EE servers and servlet containers. Java EE servers are complex, and servlet containers aren't designed for exposing software components as services," said Joe Niski and Kirk Knoernschild, analysts with Burton Group. "Meanwhile, OSGi offers a modular, dynamic, and flexible runtime environment for application code, but without networking capabilities. The combination of an OSGi container and the Apache Tomcat servlet engine offers a different model for designing and deploying applications and services written in Java,” they added.

Johnson noetd that the SpringSource Application Platform features seamless application and resource library upgrades, side-by-side version deployments, as well as application monitoring and analysis from URL throughput to query, cache and transaction statistics.

"For the development team, it provides a flexible and resilient development server that resolves the vexing application dependency problems that are a common challenge with legacy Java EE application packaging," the company said in a statement.  "The SpringSource Application Platform enables repeated incremental deployments without server restarts, shortening iterative development-test cycles and providing an ideal platform for today’s agile development approaches."

SpringSource Application Platform will be generally available in June 2008 under the GPL open source license and is available now in beta for download on the SpringSource website.