# Spring framework

The EAC Development Toolkit uses the Spring Framework's Inversion of Control container to load an EAC application based on configuration specified in an XML document.

A great deal of functionality and flexibility is provided in Spring's IoC Container and in the default bean definition XML file handled by Spring's `XmlBeanDefinitionReader` class. For details about either of these, refer to Spring Framework documentation and JavaDoc.

The EAC Development Toolkit uses a customized document format and includes a schema and custom XML handlers to parse the custom document format. It uses Spring to convert this customized configuration metadata into a system ready for execution. Specifically, the toolkit uses Spring to load a set of objects that represent an EAC application with the configuration specified for each object in the configuration document.