It’s not about Java hate. Historical context: Spring was a lightweight alternative to J2EE. It started and became popular in financial services because no one

It’s not about Java hate. Historical context: Spring was a lightweight alternative to J2EE. It started and became popular in financial services because no one wanted the boilerplate hell that was J2EE. By your logic we should all have stuck to J2EE as that was what the vendor (Sun) was pushing. Today Spring has become the new J2EE. It’s no longer lightweight. It has a gravitational field at this point. (Except less boilerplate than J2EE because the Spring devs cared about dev ex more than J2EE’s creators did.) Like J2EE back then, today, once you step out of the “framework == language” mentality, you’ll see there’s a bunch of ways to achieve what Spring does for you. Often with less code, less magic, and faster. This is not to say Spring is always bad. Use it if it makes sense — for some small teams it may make a lot of sense. But don’t sleepwalk into it because “Java means Spring.” It doesn’t.