I do agree that IOC coupled with strong interface definitions and enforcement make a good starting point for building enterprise components in large corporation

I do agree that IOC coupled with strong interface definitions and enforcement make a good starting point for building enterprise components in large corporations. Yet, after using Spring for a while, i really wondered how come there couldn't be any simpler solutions to that problem: any compiled language with a good support for interfaces should be able to reach that objective. I think the bloat came from wanting to decouple compilation time from component assembling time, using xml files. I never understood the reason for that choice (who in its right mind would change a component without recompiling for type checking and retesting the code anyway ?). I suppose it probably was the easiest way to accomplish that in Java at some point, and i'm really happy to see that latest Spring versions enable you to use Java configuration classes instead. But as enterprise means long-time support and never ending backward compatibility, i really doubt the bloat culture will fade away any time soon.