Spring Web Services (Spring-WS) is one of the project developed by the Spring Community. Its prime focus is to create document-driven Web Services. The Spring Web Services project facilitates contract-first SOAP service development, provides multiple ways to create flexible web services, which can manipulate XML payloads in multiple ways. Being Spring based, Spring Web Services uses Spring Concepts like Dependency Injection and Configurations seamlessly. Spring-WS requires Spring 3.0 version.

Spring Framework was initially written by Rod Johnson and was first released under the Apache 2.0 license in June 2003. This tutorial has been written based on the Spring Framework Version 4.1.6 released in March 2015.