Spring.NET. How actively is it being developed/supported?

Question

I've made my choice for the developement components on the .NET platform: Spring.NET for IoC and NHibernate for data access. But how safe is it?

I've heard here on SO (don't remember which post exactly) that Spring.NET is on its way down, cause for example the Java original version is developed by a large number of people; but (they say that) the sole person behind the .NET version is Mr. Mark Pollack. Is that so?

And, if so, does it still make sense to count on Spring.NET for my production applications?

• if you have similar information about NHibernate, I'll appreciate it; though it seems that the latter is actively supported.

Answer 1

I have started using nhibernate around 6 months ago and have found the support outstanding, however I find it better to use *cough* the Google nhusers group rather than Stack Overflow for support.

I decided to use unity for my IOC container as I found it works much better in Medium Trust systems than Spring does. I also found that their was a lack of community support for Spring. unity is supported by MS so hopefully it will around for a while! :)

All in all nhibernate rocks and I believe that version 3 is around the corner so it is indeed being continuously updated.

This of course is my opinion, this set up works for me, after all that is the important thing to remember in choosing any system.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Mark here, you can still count on Spring.NET for your production application, you can in fact even buy production/development support. As you might know, SpringSource was aquired by VMware and both Paul Maritz (CEO of VMware and former '#3' at Microsoft) and Rod Johnson are firmly behind the project - I even presented to Paul last week on the project. There are several active committers on Spring.NET, but most open source projects tend to have a few 'power' committers, even Spring for Java.

We are will be hiring an additional full time developer to work on Spring.NET. Top priority is getting the code based configuration model in place and a general sync with the Java code base. We are also expanding to have a port of Spring Integration for .NET and also top notch RabbitMQ support.

If you want to contact me directly to discuss more, feel free to email at mpollack at vmware dot com.

Mark Pollack