Origins of Spring
The origins of Spring can be traced back to the book Expert One-to-One J2EE Design and Development
by Rod Johnson (Wrox, 2002). In this topic, Rod presented his own framework called the Interface 21
Framework, a framework he developed to use in his own applications. Released into the open source
world, this framework formed the foundation of the Spring Framework as we know it today.
Spring proceeded quickly through the early beta and release candidate stages, and the first official
1.0 release was made available March 24, 2004. Since then, Spring has undergone dramatic growth, and
at the time of writing, the latest version of Spring Framework is 3.1.
The Spring Community
The Spring community is one of the best in any open source project we have encountered. The mailing
lists and forums are always active, and progress on new features is usually rapid. The development team
is truly dedicated to making Spring the most successful of all the Java application frameworks, and this
shows in the quality of the code that is reproduced. Much of the ongoing development in Spring is in
reworking existing code to be faster, smaller, neater, or all three.
As we mentioned already, Spring also benefits from excellent relationships with other open source
projects, a fact that is extremely beneficial when you consider the large amount of dependency the full
Spring distribution has.
From a user's perspective, perhaps one of the best features of Spring is the excellent documentation
and test suite that accompany the distribution. Documentation is provided for almost all the features of
Spring, making picking up the framework simple for new users. The test suite Spring provides is
impressively comprehensive--the development team writes tests for everything. If they discover a bug,
they fix that bug by first writing a test that highlights the bug and then getting the test to pass.
What does all this mean to you? Well, put simply, it means you can be confident in the quality of the
Spring Framework and confident that, for the foreseeable future, the Spring development team will
continue to improve upon what is already an excellent framework.
Spring for Microsoft .NET
The main Spring Framework project is 100 percent Java based. However, because of the success of the
Java version, developers in the .NET world started to feel a little bit left out; thus, Mark Pollack and Rod
Johnson started the Spring .NET project. Aside from Rod, both projects have completely different
development teams, so the .NET project should have minimal impact on the Spring Java. In fact, the
authors believe this is excellent news. Contrary to popular belief in the Java world, .NET is not a load of
garbage produced by the Beast, a fact that we can attest to, having delivered several successful .NET
applications to our clients. This project opens up whole new avenues for cross-pollination, especially
since .NET already has the lead in some areas, such as source-level metadata, and should lead to a better
product on both fronts. Another side effect of this project is that it makes the move between platforms
much easier for developers, because you can use Spring on both sides. This is given even more weight by
the fact that other projects such as Hibernate and MyBATIS now have .NET equivalents. You can find
The SpringSource Tool Suite/Spring IDE
To ease the development of Spring-based applications in Eclipse (the most commonly used IDE for Java
application development), Spring created the Spring IDE project. Soon after that, SpringSource, the
company behind Spring founded by Rod Johnson, created an integrated tool called the SpringSource
Tool Suite (STS). Although it used to be a paid product, the tool is now freely available. The tool integrates
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