what is the difference between Spring and Spring MVC framework

Question

I am new to Spring. Can any one let me know what is the difference between Spring and Spring MVC Framework ?

Answer 1

Spring

An umbrella term to denote various projects, one of which is Spring Framework.

Spring MVC

The Spring Framework project has several features. One of them is Spring MVC.

Features of Spring Framework are -

• Core Technologies: Dependency Injection, validation, data binding, type conversion, SpEL, AOP etc.

• Testing

• Data Access: Transactions, DAO support, JDBC, ORM etc.

• Spring MVC and Spring WebFlux web frameworks.

• Integration: JMS, JMX, email, scheduling etc.

• Languages: Kotlin, Groovy, dynamic languages.

So, the Spring MVC feature allows developers to build applications following Model-view-controller design pattern using Spring Framework.

Other Spring projects

• Spring Boot: For creating stand-alone Spring applications using Convention over configuration design paradigm.

• Spring Data: For creating Spring-based programming model for data access. It has various modules like Spring Data JDBC, Spring Data JPA, Spring Data MongoDB etc.

• Spring Security: Powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework for both Authentication and Authorization.

And many other projects.

NOTE

Spring, Spring Framework and Spring MVC these terms are often used interchangeably among developers which sometimes creates confusion for people who already don't know the details.