News

Pivotal Partners with IBM on Enterprise Java

• By John K. Waters
• December 5, 2017

Pivotal, the company behind the Spring Framework, today announced a series of joint efforts with IBM related to modern enterprise Java development, microservices and cloud-native design patterns.

Among other things, the two companies are planning to work together to:

• Provide IBM's Open Liberty (the open-source version of its WebSphere app server) as an embedded server option in Spring Boot. The company said this option will be available this week.
• Provide commercial support for the IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Buildpack in Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). (Buildpacks provide framework and runtime support for apps.)
• Build Spring Cloud Stream binders/connectors into IBM middleware and database software products. (Integrations are planned for IBM MQ, IBM DB2, IBM Integration Bus, IBM Watson SDK, IBM Cloudant, and IBM API Connect, as well as for the AMQP standard, the companies said.)
• Provide Docker images for IBM products that run on PKS, which the companies said is a first wave of products that will include WebSphere Liberty and MQ, with many more to come in 1Q (including API Connect and IBM Integration Bus).

Pivotal made the announcement at its SpringOne Platform annual developer conference, underway this week in San Francisco. The company also unveiled a major upgrade of the PCF, its platform-as-a-service cloud software package, which includes:

• A new serverless computing product called Pivotal Function Service, which the company expects to release in the next six months. Developers will be able to the new product to trigger activity based on data sent by users or messaging systems such as RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka, the company said.
• A new container service developed with VMware and in collaboration with Google's Cloud group. The new Pivotal Container Service will help companies the Kubernetes container orchestration tool in their datacenters and the public cloud, the company said. The service is also being billed as one of the only products with constant compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE).
• An upgrade of the company's new application runtime, Pivotal Application Service, which is part of the company's overall PCF expansion. The upgrade adds first-class support for Windows Server 2016 containers; an operational dashboard called Healthwatch, which monitors and displays important data about the platform's performance; and NSX-T integration, which allows IT teams to use PCF and NSX-T from VMware to create a common operational model for cloud-native and traditional apps.

The Spring Framework continues to be one of the most popular programming and configuration models for building modern Java-based enterprise applications on any type of deployment platform. It's an open-source, layered Java/J2EE framework based on code published in SpringSource founder Rod Johnson's book "Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development" (Wrox Press, October 2002).