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"For example, I’d be concerned if SpringSource didn’t provide 24×7 support to the major airlines who use their Web Flow technology, because I’m already having a hard enough time getting my Christmas bookings without the Air Canada site going down. "

Wow if you do not pay for 24x7 support your site goes down at Christmas, yes 3 months from now, because apparently Spring is what keeps it up and running or at least decided whether it should crash or not. Not the OS. Not the application. Not the management tools. Not operations. Without Spring and support your site is dead in the water at Christmas.

Imagine calling support ** after ** pushing the application (or updates) into production.

What a complete load of nonsense but what did we expect from the source itself.

William: My point of view on this, which may or not be the point of view of SpringSource, is that if your web app builds on a framework, that framework, along with the OS, the database, and your application, is responsible for the stability of your app. Since the Spring Framework issue is heated right now, we could also argue this in terms of another framework like .NET. If you just updated or patched your ORM mapping or other database tools, and introduced an incompatibility between that and the framework that fails to manifest itself until pushing production, you could have a problem. If the framework is providing a WS layer for you, you may need security and other patches for that WS layer as exploits become known. In other words, my point of view on this is that so much functionality traditionally associated with OSes and app servers is being captured by the frameworks, especially those that provide IoC, that it helps to think of them as another sort of runtime. I'd like to get your thoughts on this, either here or >on the post>.

Mik,

A systems reliability is designed, architected and managed.

I fail to see how having a 24x7 support for a web framework equates to improved reliability or why anyone with no commercial interest would even think this way. In all the war councils I have been called in I have never had a vendors support organization or just having a paid up contract solve a production problem. In a mature organization such problems are a combination of many factors and none specific to one small (and largely irrelevant from a system level) software component.

Open source support contracts are used much more to get a customers fixes for bugs found during development, testing and integration into the main distribution - paid prioritization. This happens in most mature organizations well before going into production at least when talking about software libraries at the application layer.

I have seen many systems achieved very high levels of reliability even though certain parts of the application stack are inherently unreliable. Reliability can be achieved in many ways including recognizing such inherent qualities.

Mik: "If you just updated or patched your ORM mapping or other database tools, and introduced an incompatibility between that and the framework that fails to manifest itself until pushing production, you could have a problem. "

Well then I would say your are a cowboy and it is irrelevant because cowboys do not pay for support.

I understand the importance of support system but I think you exaggerated things somewhat and bestowed qualities onto a product that was not deserving in such a context.

Thanks for elaborating William. I agree with you to the effect that there are many shops who would not pay for this kind of support. I disagree that middleware frameworks like Spring and the related projects are small, and its a fact that their size and functionality has been increasing. I'm also not convinced by the statement that support customers only care about bug fixes during development, because some bugs aren't identified until deployment, and still require fixes, with a much quicker turn-around and readier tradeoff of time vs. money. But for now we could agree to disagree on the finer points, and it will be interesting for us to watch what happens with support contracts for web/middleware frameworks in the near future. Previously many places did not consider 24x7 support for open source app servers Apache or Tomcat a priority, but there has been big demand for that lately, and I'm curious if the same will happen for frameworks like Spring.
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