Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was the company created by the founders of the Spring Framework (a

programming model A programming model is an execution model coupled to an API or a particular pattern of code. In this style, there are actually two execution models in play: the execution model of the base programming language and the execution model of the progr ...

for enterprise

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

applications) to support and develop Spring and related projects. Originally incorporated as Interface 21, it was renamed SpringSource in 2008 to better reflect its main business. Over time most of the Spring developers were employed full-time by the company which offered training and consulting services to finance its activities (Spring itself is

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and is freely available to all). The company was then renamed as Spring. Recognizing that the platform of choice for most Spring applications was Apache Tomcat, Spring merged with Covalent on January 29, 2008. Like Spring, Covalent was the financial vehicle supporting some of the developers of Tomcat. Several other acquisitions followed: G2One (the company behind Groovy and Grails),

Hyperic VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

(who developed a tool for monitoring Java applications and their environment) and Cloud Foundry (a Platform as a Service provider). As a result, SpringSource employed some of the lead developers and committers of the Apache Tomcat,

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache So ...

, Hyperic, Apache Groovy and Grails open source communities. SpringSource was also a participant in the Java Community Process. Using these acquisitions, the company's business expanded beyond support for its application frameworks, Spring and Grails. It could now offer a suite of software products across all three stages of the enterprise Java application life cycle: build (develop), run (deploy), and manage. SpringSource created two commercial, server products specifically aimed at Spring developers. TC Server is a commercial version of Tomcat integrated with Hyperic for deployment and management. DM Server was an OSGi based server which never was commercially viable. After spending millions on development with no result, it was subsequently donated to the Eclipse Foundation as the Virgo project. Both servers came with a number of customer support options. Educational services expanded to offer training for the Spring framework, Apache Tomcat, tc Server and Groovy/Grails through its educational services unit, the ''SpringSource University'' and also a number of partner training providers. SpringSource was purchased for $420m by

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

in August 2009, where it was maintained for some time as a separate division within VMware. The commercial products were rebadged as the vFabric Application Suite. Acquisitions continued including

RabbitMQ RabbitMQ is an open-source message-broker software (sometimes called message-oriented middleware) that originally implemented the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and has since been extended with a plug-in architecture to support Str ...

(an open-source

AMQP The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-su ...

message broker),

Redis Redis (; Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, su ...

(an open source, noSQL key-value store) and

Gemstone A gemstone (also called a fine gem, jewel, precious stone, or semiprecious stone) is a piece of mineral crystal which, in cut and polished form, is used to make jewelry or other adornments. However, certain rocks (such as lapis lazuli, opal, ...

(developer of several data-management products). These products (except redis) also became part of the vFabric product set. In April 2013, VMware, and its parent company EMC Corporation, formally created a joint venture (with GE) called

Pivotal Software Pivotal Software, Inc. was an American multinational software and services company based in San Francisco that provided cloud platform hosting and consulting services. Since December 2019, Pivotal has been part of VMware. History Pivotal So ...

. All of VMware's application-oriented products, including Spring were transferred to this organization. VMWare reacquired Pivotal in 2019 and folded it into the Tanzu application suite. VMware sold the Gemstone object database products to GemTalk Systems in May 2013. Pivotal ended their sponsorship of Groovy/Grails in March 2015.

References

External links

*{{Official website, spring.io VMware Software companies of the United States