<p>I am regularly asked about the origin of the name “Spring.” </p>
<p>The name goes back to late 2002. In November 2002, I published <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Expert-One-Design-Development-Programmer/dp/0764543857/">Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development</a>. The book was accompanied by 30,000 lines of framework code, which had accounted for a good deal of the year full-time I put into writing the book. (Writing a 750 page book is enough work on its own; writing a substantial framework to go along with it is sheer masochism. It was hard.) Many of the fundamental concepts of the Spring Framework were there: an already capable IoC container, with BeanFactory and ApplicationContext and sophisticated Dependency Injection (although that name was not coined until late 2003); an early form of what become Spring MVC with Controller, HandlerMapping and friends; the <em>template </em>concept; JdbcTemplate and the concept of technology-agnostic data access exceptions… </p>