Check out the lively debate of J2EE heavy hitters going on at Scott Haug’s blog right now.

Joining in the debate are Gavin King, co-founder of Hibernate, and Juergen Hoeller, a co-founder of Spring. The whole thing started with a post by Scott Haug entitled Hibernate hates Spring, noting that Hibernate had edited their wiki to remove all references to Spring’s existence.

Categorize this one under thematically similar project names leading to seasonal irony.

How much does Hibernate seemingly despise Spring? So much that they no longer acknowledge that Spring is a “Related Project�. Just today, Christian Bauer (core Hibernate developer and website maintainer) removed all references of Spring from this page in their wiki. Nevermind that for a good percentage of J2EE developers, Hibernate and Spring are like chocolate and peanut butter. Of course, this kind of editorial exorcism isn’t unprecedented for Hibernate; they previously heavily edited, then removed completely, the Spring integration page (no longer available) on their wiki. I guess it’s hard to blame JBoss (Hibernate’s owning company) for desiring perpetual winter (and never Christmas?); Spring’s popularity is due in no small part to its promise of successful Java enterprise development sans EJBs and, thus, the managed containers (like the JBoss Application Server) required to deploy them.

Gavin replied with a lengthy response, followed by rejoinders from Juergen and a series of back and forth posts. It’s an interesting discussion, definitely worth a read if you’re interested in Java and open source.

For the record, Jobster happily uses both Hibernate and Spring.