Spring came into being in 2003 as a response to the complexity of the early J2EE specifications. While some consider Java EE and Spring to be in competition, Spring is, in fact, complementary to Java EE. The Spring programming model does not embrace the Java EE platform specification; rather, it integrates with carefully selected individual specifications from the EE umbrella:

The Spring Framework also supports the Dependency Injection (JSR 330) and Common Annotations (JSR 250) specifications, which application developers may choose to use instead of the Spring-specific mechanisms provided by the Spring Framework.

As of Spring Framework 5.0, Spring requires the Java EE 7 level (e.g. Servlet 3.1+, JPA 2.1+) as a minimum - while at the same time providing out-of-the-box integration with newer APIs at the Java EE 8 level (e.g. Servlet 4.0, JSON Binding API) when encountered at runtime. This keeps Spring fully compatible with e.g. Tomcat 8 and 9, WebSphere 9, and JBoss EAP 7.

Over time, the role of Java EE in application development has evolved. In the early days of Java EE and Spring, applications were created to be deployed to an application server. Today, with the help of Spring Boot, applications are created in a devops- and cloud-friendly way, with the Servlet container embedded and trivial to change. As of Spring Framework 5, a WebFlux application does not even use the Servlet API directly and can run on servers (such as Netty) that are not Servlet containers.

Spring continues to innovate and to evolve. Beyond the Spring Framework, there are other projects, such as Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud, Spring Batch, among others. It’s important to remember that each project has its own source code repository, issue tracker, and release cadence. See spring.io/projects for the complete list of Spring projects.