In October of 2002, Rod Johnson, an Australian computer specialist, wrote and released the first version of Spring. In June of 2003, he released it under the Apache 2.0 license and milestone version 1.0 rolled out in March of 2004. The Spring framework is an application framework for the Java platform; it is also an inversion of control container. While any Java application can make use of its core features, there exist extensions to build web apps on top of the Java EE platform.

The framework is open-source and cross-platform.