Spring Framework

The Spring Framework in an open source application framework for the Java platform. The first version was written by Rod Johnson who first released it with the publication his book Expert One-on-one J2EE Design And Development (Programmer to programmer) (Wrox Press, October 2002).

The framework was first released under the Apache license in June 2003. The first milestone release was 1.0 which was released in March 2004 with further milestone releases in September 2004 and March 2005.

Although the Spring Framework does not enforce any specific programming model it has become widely popular in the Java community primarly as an alternative and replacement for the Enterprise JavaBean model. By design the framework offers a lot of freedom to Java developers yet provides well-documented and easy to use solutions for common practices in the industry.

While Sun Microsystems controlled the Java enterprise market in terms of investments and vendor support between 1998 and 2003 the Spring Framework has enjoyed so much adoptation between 2004 and 2006 that it now has become part of the landscape.

Spring Framework History

The first parts of what has become the Spring Framework have been written by Rod Johnson in 2000 while he was working as an independent consultant for customers in the financial industry in London. While writting his book Expert One-on-one J2EE Design And Development (Programmer to programmer) he further expanded this code to express his views on how applications that work with various parts of the J2EE platform could become simpler and more consistent than developers and companies where used to at that time.