The Apache Archiva team is pleased to announce the release of Archiva 1.1
Archiva is a build artifact repository manager for use with build tools such
as Maven, Continuum and Ant.

How does this relates to Spring ? Take a look at the release note :

"
Archiva now uses the Spring Framework as it's underlying container instead of Plexus. This results in a boost in performance and stability for the web application in particular.
"

Migrating from Plexus to Spring has been possible thanks to Spring modular architecture and namespace support. I've writen a "bridge" parser to convert Plexus XML descriptors on the fly, and support Plexus field-injection model. The archiva team used this bridge to migrate the Archiva thousand lines of code from Plexus to Spring in some fiew months.

The goal was to use a well know IoC framework in replacement for the not-so-well documented Plexus. An interesting side effect is a "a boost in performance and stability for the web application in particular".

Thanks a lot to the Spring team for this nice framework