T his chapter is taken from the book - Getting started with Spring Framework, 4th Edition ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1979962782/ ). You can download the code for the book from here: https://github.com/getting-started-with-spring/4thEdition Chapter 1 – Introduction to Spring Framework 1-1 Introduction In the traditional Java enterprise application development efforts, it was a developer’s responsibility to create well-structured, maintainable and easily testable applications. The developers used myriad design patterns to address these non-business requirements of an application. This not only led to low developer productivity, but also adversely affected the quality of developed applications. Spring Framework (or ‘Spring’ in short) is an open source application framework that simplifies developing Java enterprise applications. It provides the infrastructure for developing well-structured, maintainable and easily testable applications. When using Spring Framework, a developer