Creator of Spring: No desire to write Java at All
From Talking Kotlin by Talking Kotlin
March 27, 2025 · 1h 5m · Season 1 · Episode 136
About this episode
Rod Johnson discusses the origins of the Spring Framework and his recent experiences with Kotlin.
Sebastian and Márton chat with Rod Johnson, the creator of the Spring Framework. Rod tells the story of how Spring was born more than two decades ago, and shares his recent journey of coming back to the JVM and discovering all the fun of being a newcomer to Kotlin. Resources: Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development: Rod Johnson Oh the Places You'll Go! Shoulders of Giants: Languages Kotlin Learned From | Andrey Breslav Revamping and Extending Kotlin's Type System | Ross Tate Scala in 2018 Keynote | Rod Johnson But Java has pattern matching! | Alejandro Serrano Mena Hosts: Sebastian Aigner – Website | Bluesky Márton Braun – Website | Bluesky Guest: Rod Johnson – Twitter | LinkedIn Timeline: (0:00) Intro (0:52) The origins of Spring (6:40) You need a business model (8:21) Consistency is key (9:39) Sustainable open source (14:22) Parallels with JetBrains and Kotlin (15:29) Rod’s journey around the JVM (20:48) Shoulders of giants (22:34) The newcomer experience (24:40) LLMs write great Kotlin (30:34) “You can start without great pain” (33:32) Extension functions (36:15) Too much magic? (37:56) Rod’s feature wishlist (39:37) Versioning and compatibility (41:19) Ecosystems and…
People in this episode
Hosts: Sebastian Aigner, Márton Braun
Guest: Rod Johnson
Topics covered
- Spring Framework
- Kotlin
- JVM
- open source
- software development
- programming languages
Keywords
- Spring Framework
- Kotlin
- JVM
- open source
- software development
- programming languages
- Rod Johnson
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Spring Framework, JetBrains, Kotlin
Books & works: Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development, Oh the Places You'll Go!, Shoulders of Giants: Languages Kotlin Learned From, Revamping and Extending Kotlin's Type System, Scala in 2018 Keynote, But Java has pattern matching!
More episodes of Talking Kotlin
- Exposed 1.0 and Beyond · April 29, 2026 · 1h 35m
- How Major Metros Run on KMP · March 5, 2026 · 1h 39m
- Kotlin 2.3 Release Special (Audio Exclusive) · February 3, 2026 · 50 min
- Building AI Agents With Koog · November 17, 2025 · 1h 23m
- Discussing Kotlin Coroutines with Marcin Moskała · October 23, 2025 · 2h 3m
- kotlinx.rpc · August 11, 2025 · 1h 31m
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Talking Kotlin podcast page.