Did Guice beat Sprint to the punch?

There's been a lot of talk over the past few years that perhaps Interface 21 should push to formally make the Spring Framework a part of the JEE specs -- it seemed like it might be possible with Rod Johnson officially declaring his support for JEE 6... well it looks like "Crazy" Bob Lee and the team behind Guice may have found a back door to get themselves into the party first -- according to a new series of articles about the upcoming Web Beans, the new spec is actually influenced by a combination of Seam and Guice, rather than just Seam as previous reports had speculated...

This is not to say that Guice and Spring cover the same ground -- Guice is strictly a product that supports dependency injection, while Spring does that and much more, but I find these articles interesting in that Google has apparently taken the JBoss approach to supporting the JCP -- that is, create an independent product to fill a whole in the JEE specs, and then use the JCP to make that product into a spec itself (take a look at the JPA for a previous example)...

I personally think it's a very smart approach -- while it will perhaps create an opening for competitors to get into the market (more applicable when considering Hibernate and Seam than with Guice, admittedly), it opens up a clear opportunity to provide the first spec-compliant implementation (thus getting early adopters), and gives them a great opportunity to build and enhance their product while the competition is catching up (keeping the early adopters :) )...

We'll see where this goes, but so far it looks like an interesting spec -- I see some potential for overlap between some other specs, but that may not be a bad thing...

M