Java gets a lot of heat/dismissal, and with it the Spring framework. But I would argue that Spring's greatest achievement is the Aspect-Oriented interception a

Java gets a lot of heat/dismissal, and with it the Spring framework. But I would argue that Spring's greatest achievement is the Aspect-Oriented interception and how it enabled rapid rollout of caching, reporting, and other event interception deep in the code. Spring gives you almost for free a very deep and useful event interception model without writing craploads of boilerplate.