"The original Spring, written for Java, is a framework which at its heart uses an "Inversion of Control" container (IoC). Inside of Spring, are several subframeworks for handling aspect oriented programming(aop), Data Access Framework (Dao), transaction management, a object to relational mapping(orm), and other features. The SpringPython framework, is a port of the original Java framework. Mind you, the developers of SpringPython didn't do a "direct port of existing code" from the Java counterpart, but rather rewrote it using Python idioms." - imabonehead from Bookmarklet