Monday saw the rather surprising announcement that VMware is acquiring SpringSource for about $420m all in. After the initial shock wore off, the next question had to be: Why bother acquiring SpringSource in the first place? According to the press release:
VMware and SpringSource plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.
So VMware is going to attempt to use SpringSource’s code to virtualize application deployments and management. Given Spring’s hooks into several application frameworks, it’s certainly possible but by no means guaranteed.
With a recent stock downgrade (from Buy to Underperform), VMware has to make something happen quickly to justify spending over $400m for glorified middleware.
VMware shares are down just over 2% today.
nick Entry acquisitions, spring, vmware
Some time ago I read the excellent Enterprise Integration Patterns book and I’ve wanted to leverage the concepts detailed in the book in my own work. Eventually I found the Apache Camel project and have been impressed with how quickly I was able to integrate it into my application.
Camel is essentially a message router that allows you define routing and mediation rules using either a domain specific language (DSL) or XML. Here’s an example of a rule I’m currently using in production:
This is an asynchronous route that accepts an incoming XML payload via JMS and routes it to the correct filter component based on the root element. (While the filter component is a custom component, but it could just as easily be a simple bean invocation, or any other component supported by Camel.)
The more time I spend exploring Camel, the more impressed I am with it. I plan on making it a permanent fixture in my application stack for client projects.
nick Entry camel, spring