Publication of 'Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development'

Rod Johnson's influential book critiqued the complexity of J2EE and proposed a lightweight, container-based approach to enterprise application development, laying the conceptual groundwork for Spring and DI.

Significance

This book introduced many of the core ideas behind the Spring Framework, specifically the concept of an Inversion of Control container, which would later become the primary vehicle for Dependency Injection.