Spring (company)

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Spring, originally Interface21, is a software company based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 2004 by Rod Johnson, who created the Spring Framework for enterprise Java applications. In 2007 the company changed its name to SpringSource to reflect its link to Spring, and it is now known simply as Spring. The company focuses on open-source software and also sells commercial tools to support Spring developers.

SpringSource grew by acquiring Covalent Technologies in 2008, among others, expanding beyond the Spring Framework to cover the full life cycle of Java applications: build, run, and manage. It released two commercial servers for Spring developers: TC Server (a Tomcat-based server with deployment and management tools) and DM Server (an OSGi-based server). DM Server was later donated to the Eclipse Foundation as Virgo.

In August 2009, VMware bought SpringSource for $420 million, and the products were rebranded under the vFabric Application Suite. VMware continued to acquire more technologies, including RabbitMQ, Redis, and Gemstone; Gemstone was later sold to GemTalk Systems in 2013.

In 2013 VMware and EMC formed Pivotal Software with GE, moving Spring products into Pivotal. VMware later brought Pivotal back into its Tanzu platform in 2019. Pivotal stopped backing Groovy/Grails in 2015. The core Spring Framework remains the key open-source project.