The Spring framework is a huge one with several modules. The first version of the framework was released in 2003, and since then, there have been four major releases delivering new and enhanced features. Currently, Spring is the de facto enterprise framework used, perhaps more widely than the standard EJB 3.0

Spring supports dependency injection, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), persistence for SQL and NoSQL databases in a conventional and Object Relational Mapping way, transactional support, messaging, web programming, and many other features. You can configure it using XML configuration files, annotations, or Java classes.