EReranation·Feb 7, 2013
I think the issue is that there is no such thing as Java culture, there is Enterprise culture which is responsible for all that you said above. But there is a start of a new "Java culture" which is encouraging, see what Google did with Guava, see the Java version of Play framework, even Spring framework 3+ is not that bad, no XML, all annotations, JPA is nice as well. Look at stuff done by Yammer, Twitter, Google and other Java/Scala based companies.
I wouldn't go and dismiss one of the most popular Enterprise frameworks, as a user of Spring / Hibernate for last 7+ years, it makes a lot of sense to me in the enterprise context, just like Ruby on Rails and Play Framework makes sense to me in the SaaS contect, for instance, having Play framework with a Spring module is a nice interim solution for bringing newer technology to the enterprise
Read the rest
world.
It all depends on what you need to be doing. Spring is great for a large enterprise app, that have long lifetime, needs to connect to legacy stuff, needs common enterprise integration patterns etc.
Also if you check SpringSource latest stuff, you'll find out they are investing in lot's of cool new things, e.g. the scripted text editor - (https://github.com/scripted-editor/scripted/) and are influenced a lot by the Rails, Django, Node.js and Play communities.
The enterprise world is not that stupid, it's perhaps just a bit behind but it's still making tons of money from it's software, in billions, and it's more likely to be written in Spring / Hibernate than with Rails / ActiveRecord.
Just give it some time and patience.