Specially it has builtin caching, transaction management, DB access etc. But it connects to many external services for all of those seamlessly. It abstracts all the layers so you can easily replace everything under the hood with full compatibility as your business grows.
Aren't these mostly features of your data layer e.g. Hibernate?
> It abstracts all the layers so you can easily replace everything under the hood with full compatibility as your business grows.
Java is a perfectly capable language for implementing abstractions. What does Spring offer you there that you can't do with plain old Java?
It provides encapsulation for all of these elements that you don't have to do on your own.
A concise framework where all components talk the same language across the full stack.
Spring is many things, but it's not a "concise" framework by any means.
Well nothing. Since Spring it written in Java, anyone else using Java can do all of those things.
The things is Spring already does all these things and it does them well. It's well tested and well supported. Most people don't want to do all of this from scratch. So they need a framework anyways. So they choose Spring because it's the leading framework in Java world.
There are a lot of people who already know Spring and can become productive in a Spring codebase fairly quickly.
Yes. I was talking about Spring Boot there. Yes, that wasn't clear. Spring is a framework and some of the elements within it abstract other tools some of which are frameworks in their own right (e.g. JPA/Hibernate). There are many abstractions but Spring sort of unifies them to a single "story" you can work with. JPA under Spring makes a lot more sense with the JPA Repository etc.
Ofc these aren't all "frameworks" in the traditional sense, but that line is often arbitrary and I think this interpretation of OP's usage of the word is the most generous one.