Spring originally emerged around 2002. "The starting goal was to help reduce the complexity of J2EE development, and this was based on our strong belief that it was possible to simplify without sacrificing power and that has been pretty well accepted," Johnson said.

XML configuration enhancements in Version 2.0 include the ability to define new XML tags. In AOP, Version 2.0 is more tightly integrated with AspectJ technology, which provides an aspect-oriented extension to Java.

Migrating applications to Spring 2.0 is not a problem, Johnson said. "Nothing will break at all. You should be able to drop in a Spring 2.0 JAR [Java Archive] and all your existing configurations will work," he said.