The Spring Framework was in full force at BEAWorld 2005 in Santa Clara, CA, where BEA and Interface21 highlighted how well BEA's WebLogic server and Spring work together, and BEA announced its endorsement of Spring on WLS that includes 24x7 support for Spring in that environment.

In Tuesday's morning keynote, BEA CEO Alfred Chuang announced certification for Spring on top of WLS and 24x7 support for Spring on WLS.  He also demoed how to use WebLogic 9's management console to manage Spring beans deployed in a WLS environment.

On Tuesday afternoon, Spring committer and Interface21 principal Colin Sampaleanu took part in a panel discussion along with Mike Milinkovich from the Eclipse Foundation, Eddie O'Neill, Apache Beehive committer from BEA, and Forrester analyst Carl Zetie. The discussion centered around "Open Source's Value in Enterprise Applications", and sparked a lively set of questions and commentary.

In Wednesday's morning keynote, BEA CTO Mark Carges announced that BEA has certified a Spring bundle on BEA's dev2dev. BEA's Adam Fitzgerald showed how you could manage Tomcat and Spring under WebLogic Server.

On Wednesday afternoon, Colin Sampaleanu, BEA Director Eric Shiao, and BEA Engineer Chris Wall held a technical session on the Spring-WLS integration program. Eric highlighted advanced WLS functionality available to Spring-based apps in a WebLogic environment, Colin provided a general overview of Spring, and Chris talked about their (pleasant) experience of converting BEA's sample MedRec application from the original EJB-based architecture to a more agile and lightweight Spring-based J2EE architecture. The session scored the second highest attendance of any at the show, demonstrating high interest in usage of Spring with WebLogic.