The Spring Framework is a de facto standard for creating Java EE applications. It is lightweight, compared to its earlier competitor, EJB (short for Enterprise JavaBeans). In his book, Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB, Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring Framework, wrote the following:
Lightweight Inversion of Control containers have huge benefits for implementing J2EE applications. I believe that Inversion of Control, along with AOP, provides the basis for next-generation J2EE architectures.
And that was in 2004. He was right. In the past 16 years, since the initial release of the framework in 2002, Spring has become the first choice of frameworks that people use to build Java EE applications. And, with Spring Boot, building Spring applications has become much easier and more productive than ever before.
In this...