Hi everybody,

I'm confronted with a situation...

I've been asked to give an advise regarding which approach to take, in terms of J2EE development between Spring 3.0 and J2EE 6.0. I was, and still am, a promoter of Spring 2.5 over classic J2EE 5 development, specially with JBoss, I even migrated old apps to Spring and influenced the re-definition of the development policy here to include Spring specific APIs, and helped the development of a strategic plan to foster more lightweight solutions like Spring + Tomcat, instead of the heavier ones of JBoss, right now, we're using JBoss merely as a Web container, having what i call the "container inside the container paradox", that is, having Spring apps, with most of its APIs, running inside JBoss, So we're in the process of migrating to tomcat.

However, with the coming of J2EE 6.0 many features, that made Spring attractive at that time, easy deployment, less-coupling, even some sort of D.I, etc, seems to have been mimicked, in one way or the other. JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, WebBeans, WebProfiles, etc.

So, the question goes...

From your point of view, how save, and logical, it is to continue to invest in a non-standard J2EE development framework like Spring given the new perspectives offered by J2EE 6.0?

Can we talk about maybe 3 or 4 more years of Spring development, or do you recommend early adoption of J2EE 6.0 APIs and it's practices?

I'll appreciate any insights with this...