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

Spring Framework The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. The framework's core features can be used by any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the ...

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 prog ...

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 mos ...

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 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 Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also ...

, 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 (who developed a tool for monitoring Java applications and their environment) and

Cloud Foundry Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization. The software was originally developed by VMware, transferred to Pivotal Software (a joint ...

Platform as a Service Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

provider). As a result, SpringSource employed some of the lead developers and committers of the

, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic,

Apache Groovy Apache Groovy is a Java-syntax-compatible object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. It is both a static and dynamic language with features similar to those of Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk. It can be used as both a programming lan ...

and Grails open source communities. SpringSource was also a participant in the

Java Community Process The Java Community Process (JCP), established in 1998, is a formalized mechanism that allows interested parties to develop standard technical specifications for Java technology. Anyone can become a JCP Member by filling a form available at thJCP w ...

. 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 OSGi is an open specification and open source project under the Eclipse Foundation. It is a continuation of the work done by the OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative), which was an open standards organization fo ...

based server which never was commercially viable. After spending millions on development with no result, it was subsequently donated to the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization suppo ...

as the

Virgo Virgo may refer to: *Virgo (astrology), the sixth astrological sign of the zodiac * Virgo (constellation), a constellation *Virgo Cluster, a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Virgo *Virgo Stellar Stream, remains of a dwarf galaxy * Virgo Su ...

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 (an open source, noSQL key-value store) and Gemstone (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 Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, clo ...

, 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 S ...

. 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