All the people who diss this are nitpicking over details way too much. Yep, it's virtualization and not containers in the LXC sense, and yep, it's commercial-as-fuck and closed source. Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad.
Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docker for, on Windows: package an application, together with all of its dependencies, into a single image, and allow the user to run that single image and have it "just work" and start fast. Spoon virtualized executables start super fast, completely incomparable to starting a VM and then running a program in it, which is what everybody in this thread seems to be comparing this with.
Spoon also does this in a way that's much more accessible than Docker: A Spoon "image" is just a Windows executable, you can hand it to any user who's able to double-click an icon. That's really quite cool, especially for distributing desktop apps.
Reality is that Spoon does something that is about halfway between running an OS in a VM and LXC containers. If I were the marketing guy, I'd also call this containers, because so many of the benefits (including startup speed) are comparable. Calling it "virtualization" will make many readers think "slow, 10GB downloads, long startup times, little windows in a big window", none of which apply here.
Finally, all the ranting about how this isn't Docker at all distracts from something that IMHO is very interesting: Spoon is really decent technology, which has worked very great for very many years now (well before Docker even existed), even though it's been pretty niche among geeks.
It should also be interesting to HN how Spoon, the company, has managed to pivot its way through a changing landscape and different hypes. Not that long ago, Spoon's major product was a desktop program, Spoon Studio, that allowed you to package software with its dependencies for easy distribution. If you now look on https://spoon.net you're going to have a hard time finding that at all.
It's an interesting business! With cool technology! GitHub is closed source too, why all the hate?
On a marginally related note, I so wish Microsoft would offer free Spoon'ed IE6/7/8/9/10 executables instead of those humongous Windows VMs they have on http://modern.ie now. Spoon is perfect for solving this problem, and even if you only directly help Windows devs with it, I bet many devs on OSX/Linux have some Windows VM lying around somewhere. (Spoon actually offers this, but at a steep price)
Appreciate the corrections you made to the other posts and the kind words about our business.
A few comments:
> Yep, the linked blog post is mostly marketing blarp, announcing already-existing technology as if it's new by calling it different. That's pretty sad.
Actually, if you read the announcement or any of the home page materials -- much less look at the tour or demo -- you would immediately notice many major substantive new technologies. See my response to Jonathan above.
> A Spoon "image" is just a Windows executable,
While Spoon Studio does support deployment as a standalone Windows EXE, in Spoon containers, images are stored in a local container database. This supports deduplication, delta storage, journaling / commit / rollback, continuation, and other container-specific functionality. In addition, Spoon containers implement a differential synchronization protocol that allows efficient migration of container state between endpoints and the hub and back again over high-latency networks.
> Spoon is really decent technology, which has worked very great for very many years now (well before Docker even existed), even though it's been pretty niche among geeks.
Thank you! Yes, the underlying VM engine has been around quite a while and is a proven system. And yes, we've been doing this long before Docker existed. To their credit, Docker did popularize the term "containers", which is a much better term than "app virtualization" in my view. And building on LXC provided Docker a dynamic packaging model ("go through install steps on this clean virtual machine") rather than the "static" packaging model previously used by App-V, ThinApp, and Spoon Studio ("install on a machine and take snapshots" or "tell us what files/config you want"). Now, as it happens, we've had dynamic configuration on our roadmap for some time, and it just so happened that our efforts there reached fruition around the same time Docker came on the scene. In any event, Spoon containers are here now and we expect it will make Spoon technology accessible to a much larger audience.
I don't think however that a product with a multi-million desktop install base over 10,000+ organizations quite qualifies as "niche" (https://spoon.net/customers). Over 280,000 paid enterprise seats migrated from ThinApp to Spoon last year. And with the new Spoon containers, I feel the next year holds significant promise.
> It should also be interesting to HN how Spoon, the company, has managed to pivot its way through a changing landscape and different hypes.
Backstory on this: Spoon has actually moved sequentially pursuing a single vision for most of its existence, stopping to release specific products addressing specific problems along the way -- a time-consuming yet ultimately helpful constraint allowing us to avoid the use of any venture capital. (I will admit to a brief tangential flirtation with the game industry and some other poor decisions.) Along the way, the industry has independently pivoted around our project trajectory through the various hype cycles. We were building "app virtualization" before the term existed, and now "containers" before that term existed. I'm legitimately curious whether it will keep up with our next technology cycle!
Still, Spoon is pretty cool, it allows you to do many of the things people use Docker for, on Windows: package an application, together with all of its dependencies, into a single image, and allow the user to run that single image and have it "just work" and start fast. Spoon virtualized executables start super fast, completely incomparable to starting a VM and then running a program in it, which is what everybody in this thread seems to be comparing this with.
Spoon also does this in a way that's much more accessible than Docker: A Spoon "image" is just a Windows executable, you can hand it to any user who's able to double-click an icon. That's really quite cool, especially for distributing desktop apps.
Reality is that Spoon does something that is about halfway between running an OS in a VM and LXC containers. If I were the marketing guy, I'd also call this containers, because so many of the benefits (including startup speed) are comparable. Calling it "virtualization" will make many readers think "slow, 10GB downloads, long startup times, little windows in a big window", none of which apply here.
Finally, all the ranting about how this isn't Docker at all distracts from something that IMHO is very interesting: Spoon is really decent technology, which has worked very great for very many years now (well before Docker even existed), even though it's been pretty niche among geeks.
It should also be interesting to HN how Spoon, the company, has managed to pivot its way through a changing landscape and different hypes. Not that long ago, Spoon's major product was a desktop program, Spoon Studio, that allowed you to package software with its dependencies for easy distribution. If you now look on https://spoon.net you're going to have a hard time finding that at all.
It's an interesting business! With cool technology! GitHub is closed source too, why all the hate?