Matt’s thoughts on Spring came on the same day I just started looking at it.  When I mean looking, I literally mean just that.  All I did was think “What’s this Spring thing people are asking me about?” So I found this ServerSide article that gives a 1,000 ft overview of Spring.  My first thought was one of Matt’s gripes: Programming in XML?  No thank Eww.  My second: When this abstraction leaks, it probably leaks badly and in insidious ways.

You see, for business reasons I could really rant and rave about, we did J2EE the ol’ fashioned way — EJB’s,direct calls to the database (i.e. no Hibernate), and scriptlets in our JSP’s.  We didn’t even bother with custom JSP tags — just put the code in the JSP’s! And we liked it!

Okay, we really didn’t.  But it was what we had to do.  No Spring.  No Struts. No Hibernate.  Just POJ2EE. It was painful.

I’ve never used Spring, or any of the tools above, but it seems the choice is between XML config files or code with no happy medium. No wonder why things like Ruby on Rails, Django, and Grails are taking the world by storm.