While there may be a rule of thumb in the enterprise that 80 percent of a software project should comprise of off-the-shelf components and the remaining 20 percent is custom development, Brasacchio said that 20 percent can be almost triple the product's cost.

"So what was the benefit? Focus on the business requirements," he said. "Spring has led to rapid application development as a lot of the core components are already there. For example, there is simple Web services integration."

Brasacchio said both Spring and Hibernate are used heavily in commercial environments because they allow simulation of as much of application as required, like how many concurrent users will need to be supported.

Groupware is also contributing the open source ecosystem with the recent release of extensions to the Spring Java application framework.

The Spring Layout, Spring MVC and tag extensions are now open source projects hosted on Sourceforge.net.