I wouldn't say incredibly well, more like a passing mark. In fact I would compare Spring to Maven: It gets the job done, it's probably even the best of the alte

I wouldn't say incredibly well, more like a passing mark. In fact I would compare Spring to Maven: It gets the job done, it's probably even the best of the alternatives, it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I find that for many of the configuration use cases that Spring is supposed to solve I am better off doing things programmatically (heresy in the Java world). Yes, this can be done and still have testable, decoupled configuration. (As for changing configuration on the fly, nobody does that. It is a leftover from the "Deployer" role defined by Sun's J2EE specification.)