I first heard the term “opinionated architecture” in Keith Donald’s presentation during The Spring Experience. He used this term to describe the emergence of new web frameworks, such as Grails and Ruby on Rails. The term immediately caught my attention, as it describes in two words what we’ve been trying to achieve with OpenSpaces and Spring. Owen Taylor explains that very well in his recent blog Opinionated architecture – blue prints without the middleman . I particularly liked this testimonial:

As it happens, I have watched the growth of OpenSpaces
over the last many months with the skeptical eye of a – er skeptic –
not realizing that the purpose of the framework is not only buzzword
compliance and the implementation of popular development practices, but
in the context of GigaSpaces
and what is offered to our prospects and customers, a truly opinionated
framework that takes the vastly flexible GigaSpaces infrastructure and
service implementations and distills *the* successful use of it all
into enforceable use of the Spring programmatic approach and
technologies, thus empowering the neophyte and thought-leader alike
with the unmistakably opinionated path to success.
The beauty of the switch to the prescriptive and formulaic from the
free and often flailing style, is the stunningly rapid improvement in
adoption rate, early prototyping successes, and sustained
production-systems that continue to reinforce my growing certainty that
we got our bit of it right this time.