In the early days, it was very difficult for programmers to manage enterprise applications, because the enterprise Java technologies like Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) were much heavier to provide the enterprise solutions to programmers. 

When EJB technology was first announced, it was offering a distributed component model that would allow the developers to focus only on the business side of the system while ignoring the middleware requirements, such as wiring of components, transaction management, persistence operations, security, resource pooling, threading, distribution, remoting, and so on; however, it was a very cumbersome process for developing, unit testing, and deploying EJB applications. Some of the following complexities were faced while using EJB:

• Forcing implementation of unnecessary interfaces and methods
• Making unit testing difficult, especially outside the EJB container
• Inconveniences in managing deployment descriptors
• Tedious exception handling

At that time, Spring was introduced as an alternative technology especially made for EJB, because Spring provided a very simple, leaner, and lighter programming model compared with other existing Java technologies. Spring makes it possible to overcome the preceding complexities, and also to avoid the use of some other heavier enterprise technologies by using many available design patterns. The Spring Framework focused on the POJO programming model rather than a non-invasive programming model. This model provided the simplicity to the Spring Framework. It also empowered ideas such as the dependency injection (DI) pattern and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), using the proxy pattern and decorator pattern.