Spring Framework

The Spring Framework is an open-source application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. Developed by Pivotal Software, it has become one of the most popular frameworks for building Java applications, especially enterprise-level applications. Spring is known for its comprehensive infrastructure support for developing robust Java applications.

At its core, Spring provides an IoC container that manages Java objects, known as beans, through dependency injection. This helps in promoting loose coupling between components. Spring supports aspect-oriented programming, allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns (like logging and transaction management) from the business logic.

Spring is modular, consisting of several modules that provide a range of services, including data access, transaction management, web application development, messaging, and more. For web applications, Spring offers the Spring MVC framework, a rich framework for building web applications following the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

Spring simplifies interaction with databases through its JDBC abstraction layer and provides support for integrating with ORM frameworks like Hibernate, JPA, and JDO. Spring provides a consistent transaction management interface that can scale down to a local transaction and scale up to global transactions (JTA).

Spring integrates well with other enterprise technologies, offering support for remoting, JMS, web services, and scheduling.