Despite the disagreement, I'll stand by my earlier remarks: Many popular Java frameworks involve a lot of boilerplate. I've never used Spring, so I can't commen

Despite the disagreement, I'll stand by my earlier remarks: Many popular Java frameworks involve a lot of boilerplate. I've never used Spring, so I can't comment on it. But in the last two years, I've worked on multiple GWT and Android applications, and both frameworks encourage people to write a lot of code for something as simple as MVC bindings. Seriously, GWT can easily require 10x as much code as Backbone.js + CoffeeScript. I'm impressed by newer Java frameworks like Play, which make Java look terse and flexible. And I agree that refactoring IDEs are amazing tools, and well worth some sacrifices to use. I merely disagree with skrebbel's remark that, The advantages of IDEs over text editors isn't look or feel. It's code quality. The are multiple, valid ways to achieve high code quality. IDEs are one of them. But there are real tradeoffs here, and other legitimate choices.