http://www.stockxpert.com/browse_image/view/567003

Wow if you do not pay for 24×7 support your site goes down at Christmas, yes 3 months from now, because apparently Spring is what keeps it up and running or at least decided whether it should crash or not. Not the OS. Not the application. Not the management tools. Not operations. Without Spring and support your site is dead in the water at Christmas.

My point of view on this, which may or not be the point of view of SpringSource, is that if your web app builds on a framework, that framework, along with the OS, the database, and your application, is responsible for the stability of your app. Since the Spring Framework issue is heated right now, we could also argue this in terms of another framework like .NET. If you just updated or patched your ORM mapping or other database tools, and introduced an incompatibility between that and the framework that fails to manifest itself until pushing production, you could have a problem. If the framework is providing a WS layer for you, you may need security and other patches for that WS layer as exploits become known. In other words, my point of view on this is that so much functionality traditionally associated with OSes and app servers is being captured by the frameworks, especially those that provide IoC, that it helps to think of them as another sort of runtime.