Rod Johnson is known as the founder of Spring Framework. Rod was an academic before going into software field. Rod completed his art degree (majoring in Computer Science and Music) from the University of Sydney. After that he had done a Ph.D. in musicology. He wrote a Ph.D. on nineteenth century French piano music. He worked for 18 months as a lecturer on Music History at Sydney University. Since the release of Java and J2EE he had actively participated in the Java Community Process as a member of the JSR-154 (Servlet 2.4) and JDO 2.0 Expert Groups.

Currently Rod is a CEO of Interface21. It is an international company currently based at the London. It provides open source products like the Spring Framework, AspectJ and Spring Web Flow and is office of Interface21.

Rod began his Spring Framework project in February 2003. Rod, an open source developer is known as one of the world's leading personalities of Java and J2EE development. He is a popular conference speaker. Rod has a wide range experience as a consultant of many industries like insurance, media and finance. Before 1996 Rod worked in C and C++ after that he worked over java and its made him a specialist in server-side Java development.

He also known as a best-selling author who wrote many books like : -

-"Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002)" which provides the knowledge of distributed architecture, use of EJB, development of an efficient data access strategy, design a clean and maintainable web interface and design J2EE applications.

- “Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework” it provides the knowledge of Spring's Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) framework in J2EE development, use Spring's programmatic and declarative transaction management services, how to access data using Spring's JDBC functionality, iBATIS SQL Maps, Hibernate, and other O/R mapping frameworks, Spring services for accessing and implementing EJBs and Spring's remoting framework and many more.

Apart from this in “Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework” Rod provided in-depth knowledge of spring tools and also show that how Spring can solve-out the common problems faced by Java developers to build J2EE and Java applications.

Rod Johnson is always busy with the intellectual conferences and workshops scheduled at diverse locations around the globe. He was awarded a prize for giving one of the top 20 presentations at JavaOne in 2005, and delivered keynotes at the JavaWorld conference in Tokyo, June, 2005, the JAX conference in Munich (October, 2005) and the Spring Experience conference in Bal Harbour, Florida, in December 2005.