Spring Framework Overview :: Spring Framework (original) (raw)

Spring came into being in 2003 as a response to the complexity of the earlyJ2EE specifications. While some consider Java EE and its modern-day successor Jakarta EE to be in competition with Spring, they are in fact complementary. The Spring programming model does not embrace the Jakarta EE platform specification; rather, it integrates with carefully selected individual specifications from the traditional EE umbrella:

The Spring Framework also supports the Dependency Injection (JSR 330) and Common Annotations (JSR 250) specifications, which application developers may choose to use instead of the Spring-specific mechanisms provided by the Spring Framework. Originally, those were based on common javax packages.

As of Spring Framework 6.0, Spring has been upgraded to the Jakarta EE 9 level (for example, Servlet 5.0+, JPA 3.0+), based on the jakarta namespace instead of the traditional javax packages. With EE 9 as the minimum and EE 10 supported already, Spring is prepared to provide out-of-the-box support for the further evolution of the Jakarta EE APIs. Spring Framework 6.0 is fully compatible with Tomcat 10.1, Jetty 11 and Undertow 2.3 as web servers, and also with Hibernate ORM 6.1.

Over time, the role of Java/Jakarta EE in application development has evolved. In the early days of J2EE and Spring, applications were created to be deployed to an application server. Today, with the help of Spring Boot, applications are created in a devops- and cloud-friendly way, with the Servlet container embedded and trivial to change. As of Spring Framework 5, a WebFlux application does not even use the Servlet API directly and can run on servers (such as Netty) that are not Servlet containers.

Spring continues to innovate and to evolve. Beyond the Spring Framework, there are other projects, such as Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud, Spring Batch, among others. It’s important to remember that each project has its own source code repository, issue tracker, and release cadence. See spring.io/projects for the complete list of Spring projects.