The Spring Framework provides extensive support for managing large enterprise Java applications and also addresses the complexities of enterprise application development. Spring provides a complete set of API and configuration models for modern enterprise applications so that programmers just need to focus on the business logic of the application. 

Introduced as a lightweight framework, the Spring Framework was aimed at providing a way of making the development of Java enterprise applications easy and simple.

This chapter will help you gain a better understanding of the core features of the Spring Framework. We will start with an introduction to the Spring Framework. This chapter will also give you a clear understanding of every major module of the Spring Framework. After having a quick look at the important modules in the Spring Framework, we will dive into the world of Spring projects. We will also have a clear understanding of the Spring Inversion of Control (IoC) container. At the end, we will have a look at the new features and enhancements introduced in Spring 5.0.

In this chapter, we will be looking at the following topics:

• Introducing the Spring Framework
• Understanding Spring modules
• Spring projects
• Spring IoC container
• New features in Spring Framework 5.0