Spring Boot

Spring Boot History

YearEvent
2003Rod Johnson releases the initial Spring Framework code to the open-source community as an alternative to complex EJB structures
2009VMware enters the picture, acquiring SpringSource (the company driving core Spring development) for roughly $420 million
2012VMware and its parent company EMC spin out Pivotal Software, moving the core Spring engineering team under this new cloud-native entity
2014Spring Boot 1.0 is officially released
2018Spring Boot 2.0 launches, includes strict Java 8 baseline and reactive programming using project reactor
2019VMware re-absorbs Pivotal Software for $2.7 billion
2022Spring Boot 3.0 launches, drops old javax namespaces for jakarta and establishing a strict Java 17 baseline
2023Broadcom acquires VMWare for $69 billion
2025Spring Boot 4.0 is released, breaking ground on a massive multi-year support path running on a Java 21 baseline

Abbreviations

  • POJO: Plain Old Java Object
  • JavaBeans: Simple Objects with only getters and setters
  • Spring Beans: POJOs configured in the application context
  • DTO: Bean used to move state between layers

Servlet Container?