Rod Johnson is an Australian computer specialist and cofounder of SpringSource. He is also the author of the book, Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development, published in November 2002. This book contains about 30,000 lines of code that contain the fundamental concepts such as Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI) of the framework. This code is referred to as interface21. He wrote this code with an intention for it to be used by developers to simplify their work or use it as a basis of their own development. He never thought of any framework development or anything like that. There happened to be a long discussion at the Wrox forum about the code, its improvement, and quite a lot of things changed. Juergen Horller and Yann Caroffa, two readers of the forum, proposed the thought of making the code as a base of a new framework. This is the reasoning of Yann, Spring the fresh new start after Winter of traditional J2EE, who named the framework as the Spring Framework. The project became public in June 2003 and powered towards 1.0. After that, lots of changes and upgrades took place to withstand and support the technologies in the market. In this book, we aim, about the latest version, 5.0 RC1. In a couple of pages, we will cover the new features added in this version. In the subsequent pages, we will cover how to use the latest features in your application and how, as a developer, you can take advantage of these new features to develop applications faster, and with better performance.