[ollysb]

The Spring framework was released in 2003 when Java was at v1.4. From memory it wasn't the first DI framework either.

[layer8]

The term was coined in 2004: https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html

It’s not correct that Java was designed for it, unless you want to call class loading dependency injection. It’s merely that Java’s reflection mechanism happened to enable DI frameworks. The earlier Java concept was service locaters (also discussed in the article linked above).