There is MVC. Its just a concept, unlike those design patterns from GoF which are specific. Models are just data, View are just representations and Controllers

There is MVC. Its just a concept, unlike those design patterns from GoF which are specific. Models are just data, View are just representations and Controllers are just endpoints. You can program your own way in your language, and if you can categorize your code as such, you can argue it is MVC. And of course, because its just a concept, anyone in the world can argue why your implementation is not MVC as well. No, MVC is not the reason to justify Spring, inversion of control, containers, dependency injection, annotation and all other "enterprisey J2EE-esque shovelware" as you mentioned. MVC has been around since SmallTalk (you know, before even Java...). Heck, you even get MVC in Rails. You see Spring in Rails? Dependency Injections? Annotations? Of course not, since I could not even begin to think they are related.