There are ways of writing Spring without annotations (or XML config): https://blog.frankel.ch/annotation-free-spring/ https://blog.frankel.ch/annotation-free-sp

There are ways of writing Spring without annotations (or XML config): https://blog.frankel.ch/annotation-free-spring/ https://blog.frankel.ch/annotation-free-spring/ Granted, they may not be used much, but if you have an existing application it's probably easier to migrate away from the annotations than to switch to a different framework altogether.