Originally incorporated by Rod Johnson in 2004 as Interface21, the company was renamed SpringSource in 2007 to better reflect its association with the Spring Framework. Over time, most Spring developers were employed full-time. Spring is
open source. The company was eventually renamed Spring. Spring acquired Covalent Technologies on January 29, 2008, which was then one of the leading contributors to
Apache Tomcat. Several other acquisitions then followed: • G2One, the company behind
Apache Groovy and
Grails, acquired in November 2008 • Hyperic, which developed a tool for monitoring Java applications and their environment, acquired in May 2009 •
Cloud Foundry, a
Platform as a Service provider, acquired in August 2009 Using these acquisitions, the company's business expanded beyond support for its application frameworks, Spring and Grails. It went on to offer a suite of software products across all three stages of the enterprise Java application life cycle: build (develop), run (deploy), and manage. SpringSource created two commercial server products specifically aimed at Spring developers: TC Server, a commercial version of Tomcat integrated with Hyperic for deployment and management, and DM Server, an
OSGi based server which never was commercially viable. After spending millions on development with no result, it was subsequently donated to the
Eclipse Foundation as the
Virgo project. Both servers came with a number of customer support options. == Acquisition by VMware ==