front matter
Spring entered the development world more than 18 years ago with the fundamental mission of making Java application development easier. Originally, that meant offering a lightweight alternative to EJB 2.x. But Spring was just getting started. Over the years, Spring expanded its mission of simplicity to address common development challenges, including persistence, security, integration, cloud computing, and others.
Although Spring is closing in on two decades of enabling and simplifying enterprise Java development, it shows no signs of slowing down. Spring continues to address Java development challenges, whether it be creating an application deployed to a conventional application server or a containerized application deployed to a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud. And with Spring Boot providing autoconfiguration, build dependency help, and runtime monitoring, there has never been a better time to be a Spring developer!