The Spring Framework is an open source application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform.
The first version was written by Rod Johnson, who released the framework with the publication of his book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development in October 2002. The framework was first released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2003. The first milestone release, 1.0, was released in March 2004, with further milestone releases in September 2004 and March 2005. The Spring 1.2.6 framework won a Jolt productivity award and a JAX Innovation Award in 2006. Spring 2.0 was released in October 2006, Spring 2.5 in November 2007, Spring 3.0 in December 2009, and Spring 3.1 in December 2011. The current version is 3.2.2, which was released in March 2013. Spring Framework 4.0 is expected by the end of 2013, with plans to support Java SE 8, Groovy 2, some aspects of Java EE7, and WebSockets.
The core features of the Spring Framework can be used by any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the Java EE platform. Although the Spring Framework does not impose any specific programming model, it has become popular in the Java community as an alternative to, replacement for, or even addition to the Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) model.
Read more about Spring Framework: Modules, Criticisms, See Also
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