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

Rod Johnson's seminal book not only critiqued EJB 2.x but also presented the foundational code and concepts for what would become Spring Framework, advocating for lightweight, POJO-based development.

Significance

This book was the conceptual birthplace of Spring, sparking a revolution in how enterprise Java applications would be built and directly providing the initial codebase for the framework.