The first version of Spring Framework 1.0 was released in March 2004. In the last decade and a half, the Spring Framework remains the number one framework of choice to develop enterprise applications in the Java world.
In this chapter, we will take a 10,000 feet look at the journey of the Spring Framework.
The Spring Framework is highly modular with more than 20 different modules. Spring Modules provide the core features of the Spring Framework—Dependency Injection (DI), the Web MVC Framework, AOP, and more. Spring Modules help you to pick and choose the modules you want to use.
Architectures have continuously evolved during the last decade. Almost all enterprises are on the journey from monolith architectures to microservices architectures. The Spring Framework evolved continuously to keep up with the needs of enterprise applications.
Spring Projects explore solutions to the evolving challenges in enterprises. Some of the important Spring Projects are Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Data, Spring Batch, and Spring Security.
In this chapter, we will get a big picture of the entire Spring landscape—including the evolution of important Spring Modules and Spring Projects. We will end the chapter by looking at the new features in Spring Framework 5.0 and 5.1.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Why the Spring Framework is popular
- How the Spring Framework has adapted to the evolution of application architectures
- What the important modules in the Spring Framework are
- Where the Spring Framework fits in the umbrella of Spring Projects
- What the new features in Spring Framework 5.0 and 5.1 are