How does ServiceMix Kernel compare to Spring Application Platform?
SpringSource has announced in early may 2008 a new product under GPL named SpringSource Application Platform.
Though the idea is quite similar to ServiceMix Kernel, we think the focus is somewhat different and the features offered by ServiceMix Kernel go way beyong what SpringSource Application Platform (SAP) provides.
SAP mostly focuses on web applications using hibernate. To strongly support this use case, they have extended the OSGi runtime they use in a number of different ways: adding load time weaving into the core OSGi runtime, adding some non OSGi compliant manifest headers to bypass the standard OSGi classloading mechanism. While these features are great, ServiceMix aims to be compliant with any OSGi runtime and won't go that way.
In addition, ServiceMix provides a great number of additional features (file deployer, provisioning, console, log system) that make ServiceMix Kernel a much easier to use platform to deploy your applications.
Last, but not least, the license of ServiceMix Kernel is licensed under the Apache Software License, which is the most business friendly open source license, whereas the GPL license that SAP uses can be sometimes seen as viral.
