> On the other hand, the productivity and expressiveness return on investment is huge. Spring is arguably the state of the art framework on the server and is in

> On the other hand, the productivity and expressiveness return on investment is huge. Spring is arguably the state of the art framework on the server and is integrated with so many powerful technologies. Having worked with Spring for years (and still working with it, unfortunately), I have found exactly the opposite. It does way too much dynamically, making debugging hard and rendering the type-system almost useless. Sure, it comes with a lot of libraries for handling a large varieties of tasks, but they all seem to be half-assed, and much of the time I either have to work around their limitations or write something myself anyway. I really don't see why the same thing couldn't have been achieved by writing a bunch of useful libraries that don't depend on a dependency injection framework (which I also don't find much value in). Finally, it takes forever to startup, making testing a pain. It even means that JUnit tests are slow.