When we take the J2EE stack and try and slim it down, maybe using Spring or something, we still end up with thousands of lines of XML. The only way to really change things is to pull the lever all the way over, set the dials to 11, no configuration, no XML, no flexibility. Alan Francis

I went to a Spring Talk the other week. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for Spring. And Rick Evans was good, even to being sane enough to prefere Intellij to Eclipse. One question was “What is the philosophy of Spring?, which could have been (but wasn’t) answered as

• configuration over convention
• unopinionated software