The Spring Framework is one of the most popular open source Java application frameworks and IoC containers. Spring was originally developed by Rod Johnson and Jurgen Holler. The first milestone version of Spring Framework was released in March 2004. Though it has been a decade and a half, the Spring Framework remains the framework of choice to build any Java application.

The Spring Framework provides comprehensive infrastructure support for developing enterprise Java applications. So, developers don't need to worry about the infrastructure of the application; they can focus on the business logic of the application, rather than handling the configuration of the application.

All infrastructure, configuration, and meta configuration files, either Java-based or XML-based, are handled by the Spring Framework. So, this framework gives you more flexibility in building an application with a Plain Old Java Object (POJO) programming model rather than a non-invasive programming model.

The Spring IoC container forms the core of the entire framework by putting together any application's various components. Spring Model-View-Controller (MVC) components can be used to build a very flexible web tier. The IoC container simplifies the development of the business layer with POJOs.