The technology that Spring is most identified with is the Dependency Injection (DI) flavor of Inversion of Control. The Inversion of Control (IoC) is a general concept, and it can be expressed in many different ways and Dependency Injection is merely one concrete example of Inversion of Control.
When writing a complex Java application, application classes should be as independent as possible of other Java classes to increase the possibility to reuse these classes and to test them independently of other classes while doing unit testing. Dependency Injection helps in gluing these classes together and same time keeping them independent.
What is dependency injection exactly? Let's look at these two words separately. Here the dependency part translates into an association between two classes. For example, class A is dependent on class B. Now, let's look at the second part, injection. All this means is that class B will get injected into class A by the IoC.
Dependency injection can happen in the way of passing parameters to the constructor or by post-construction using setter methods. As Dependency Injection is the heart of SpringFramework, so I will explain this concept in a separate chapter with a nice example.