Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

Hi,
These days, a lot of hype is made around the Spring project.

What does spring exactly do?
Is it a competing technology to ejb?

Because i've heard that spring offers dependency injection , inversion of control, transaction and even remoting.

Distributed transaction is one of the main reaons to use ejbs but now ejb 3 provides both dependency injection and inversion of control.

What else does spring offer?

Can u kindly explain?