For me the issue with spring-style configuration isn't so much the sheer volume, as almost everything has sensible defaults, it's the loss of type-checking. Whe

For me the issue with spring-style configuration isn't so much the sheer volume, as almost everything has sensible defaults, it's the loss of type-checking. When everything is configured via xml, you have to run the app before you know if the configuration is even valid, and refactoring becomes hell because settings are all referenced via strings instead of qualified names.