Pivotal, the company currently funding development of the popular Spring Framework, recently announced JSR 352 (aka Batch Applications for the Java Platform) compliance for the Spring Batch project. More specifically, Spring Batch targets JSR-352 Java SE runtime compatibility rather than Java EE runtime compatibility. If you are surprised that APIs included in Java EE can pass TCKs targeted for Java SE, you should not be. Many other Java EE APIs target compatibility in Java SE environments such as JMS and JPA. You can read about Spring Batch's support for JSR-352 here as well as the Spring configuration to get JSR-352 working in Spring (typically a very low level implementation concern intended to be completely transparent to most JSR-352 users).

JSR 352 is one of the few very encouraging cases of major active contribution to the Java EE standard from the Spring development team (the other major effort being Rod Johnson's co-leadership of JSR 330 along with Bob Lee). While IBM's Christopher Vignola led the spec and contributed IBM's years of highly mission critical batch processing experience from products like WebSphere Compute Grid and z/OS batch, the Spring team provided major influences to the API in particular for the chunk processing, listeners, splits and operational interfaces. The GlassFish team's own Mahesh Kannan also contributed, in particular by implementing much of the Java EE integration work for the reference implementation. This was an excellent example of multilateral engineering collaboration through the standards process.

For many complex reasons it is not too hard to find evidence of less than amicable interaction between the Spring ecosystem and the Java EE standard over the years if one cares to dig deep enough. In reality most developers see Spring and Java EE as two sides of the same server-side Java coin. At the core Spring and Java EE ecosystems have always shared deep undercurrents of common user bases, bi-directional flows of ideas and perhaps genuine if not begrudging mutual respect. We can all hope for continued strength for both ecosystems and graceful high notes of collaboration via efforts like JSR 352.