Ok, now you are talking about success that Sun and/or Java community did deliver on. I loved composing object maps with application.xml when I was a Spring user

Ok, now you are talking about success that Sun and/or Java community did deliver on. I loved composing object maps with application.xml when I was a Spring user. That was a full head+shoulders above hand-coding constructors and calling setters. And yes, it was a clean interface for a GUI but I never went there. To be sure, that is configuration, though.