Spring is ramping into the cloud I read. In my opinion VMWare produces great products and are in a huge growth market. This will pull a lot of java folks into the cloud that haven't gotten around to it yet. Still, I agree, seems like a strange acquisition.
I haven't used it much in a couple year, but I would not consider Spring lean software in the least, as stated. Standard package comes with quite a bit, but even at it's leanest IoC I'd consider Google Guice leaner (and prettier imo). Certainly better than the old EJB specs though.
It's basically a move into cloud service offerings, so that they can move up the vertical chain - build, run and manage.
I thought it was a little strange at first, but it's quite exciting if they can bring simple hosting and scaling to Java apps, in the same way Spring has made enterprise development easy with Java.
When all is said and done, this might be a pretty interesting story about how to start a company - and make money running it - based on an open source model.
I haven't used it much in a couple year, but I would not consider Spring lean software in the least, as stated. Standard package comes with quite a bit, but even at it's leanest IoC I'd consider Google Guice leaner (and prettier imo). Certainly better than the old EJB specs though.