Spring

Spring is an application framework for Java, first released by Rod Johnson in 2003 as an alternative to the complexity of J2EE. Its core principle is dependency injection — the framework manages object creation and wiring, letting application code focus on business logic rather than infrastructure plumbing.

The current release is Spring Framework 7.0, and Spring Boot 4.0 builds on top of it with auto-configuration and embedded servers for stand-alone deployment. The ecosystem includes Spring MVC for traditional request-response web applications, WebFlux for reactive non-blocking workloads, Spring Data for database access, and Spring Security for authentication and authorization. Recent versions added support for Java virtual threads and ahead-of-time compilation to GraalVM native images.

The reference documentation covers all Spring projects. The source code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.