In the early 2000s, Java enterprise development had become a bureaucratic nightmare: a proliferation of untestable Java artefacts, heavyweight application servers, and ivory-tower standards disconnected from the realities of building software.

Then Rod Johnson published a book, included some code, and challenged the entire direction of enterprise Java.
Spring began as a developer-led push to take back control from ivory tower standards and was driven by a belief that building Java applications could be simple, testable, and grounded in real-world needs. Early Spring still used XML, but in a fundamentally different way: less of it, and with simpler, more focused Java. 

The framework created to prove that point brought dependency injection and inversion of control into the mainstream, and went on to become the backbone of enterprise software worldwide.
Today, Spring powers systems at Netflix, Alibaba, and countless organisations most people never hear about but depend on every day.
This is the story of how developers reclaimed control and changed software. 

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Producer: Guillermo López
Project Manager: Guillermo Cistari

Produced by: Tech Documentaries: (www.techdocumentaries.com)

Thanks to our sponsors for making this documentary possible:
HeroDevs: https://www.herodevs.com (Platinum)
Jet brains: https://www.jetbrains.com — https://www.jetbrains.com/idea (Gold)
Moderne: https://www.moderne.ai/solutions/spring-boot-migration-tool-enterprise-scale-upgrades?utm_source=techdocumentaries&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=spring_documentary&utm_content=video (Bronze)

Thanks to Railway, our channel sponsor, for supporting all of our films:
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The Spring Documentary features::
Rod Johnson, Jürgen Höller, Rossen Stoyanchev,  Mark Pollack,  Sébastien Deleuze, Josh Long, Stéphane Nicoll, David Sayer, Scott Frederick, Steve Poole, Marit van Dijk,  Marco Behler and Sergi Almar.

Additional thanks to:
Spring I/O: https://2026.springio.net
Devoxx UK: https://www.devoxx.co.uk

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A documentary-style retrospective on the Spring Framework's 20-year history, told through interviews with key contributors including Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, and Dave Syer. It covers Spring's origins as a reaction to J2EE complexity, the grassroots open-source movement that challenged enterprise Java incumbents like Sun, IBM, and Oracle, the evolution from core Spring to Spring Boot, and the ecosystem's expansion into Kotlin, Spring AI, and MCP integration. Also features perspectives from JetBrains on IntelliJ IDEA's Spring support, HeroDevs on legacy Spring support, and reflections on Spring's enduring community culture.

How a Group of Developers Took Back Control from Enterprise Java | Spring: The Documentary