Spring's next steps in enterprise Java

In the interview SpringSource Elected Newest Executive Member of the Java Community Process, Rod Johnson offers a glimpse of Spring's future and where it is heading in the JEE world. Things you could previously read between the lines come to the surface here. My main takeaways are largely what I have thought for a long time.

• PHP, Ruby on Rails and .NET need to be taken seriously as threats. The JEE platform, and other platforms as well, must keep evolving or die out. It cannot rely forever on strengths such as scalability and reliability, since competing technologies may acquire them relatively soon. We need innovation and we need to adopt proven practices. The main aim is to make JEE considerably easier to use.
• Spring, or more precisely SpringSource dm Server, is a full-fledged alternative to traditional JEE servers as we know them. OSGi is the big bet and, to my mind, the greatest risk so far. It affects application design, packaging, development and deployment.
• SpringSource dm Server clearly shows that SpringSource, the company behind Spring, wants to focus on the runtime and become a full-fledged middleware vendor. That makes sense. It is where the money is. So it is unsurprising that SpringSource says dm Server will implement JEE 6, at least at the web profile level.
• Having joined the JCP (Java Community Process), SpringSource can influence decisions that serve its interests. One example might be adopting OSGi as another deployment model.