This chapter gives you an overview of the Spring Framework. We discussed the general problems faced in the Java enterprise application development and how they have been addressed by the Spring Framework. We have seen the overall major changes happen in each version of Spring from its first introduction to the market. The backbone of the Spring Framework is the bean. We used Spring to simplify the work of managing them by the container. We also discussed two Spring containers in depth, BeanFactory and ApplicationContext, and how they can be used by the developers. The containers are involved in the process of the bean life cycle management.

In the next chapter, we are aiming to discuss the bean state management in depth, with a very famous terminology, dependency injection, and the bean life cycle management in detail.