I'm no fan of Spring, but I do want to echo your sentiment. There are a lot of really good Java libraries and frameworks that are often lumped together in peopl

I'm no fan of Spring, but I do want to echo your sentiment. There are a lot of really good Java libraries and frameworks that are often lumped together in people's view with the more verbose "enterprisey" concepts. There are two things I really like about Java in the broad sense: the excellent Eclipse environment, and the multitude of quality open source libraries.