Spring has been around for quite a while now. I guess most projects still use XML for the config, but with the 2.5 release that will probably change. Alef Arendsen has a blogpost with links to a lot of resources about the new features, and upcoming ones.
Update: Spring JavaConfig M3 is released.
Gavin King has read the post I pointed to in Extraordinarily typesafe and points out how new features in the Java world are giving us a lot of new possibilities in a type safe way.
I am slowly coming to my senses seeing how much benefit newer features like generics, static imports and annotations are bringing to the game. I used to think that these features were nice to have, but didn’t revolutionize the way we develop our applications. After seeing how Jmock2, Guice, Quaré and others use new features to change the way we code I am beginning to see the light.
I didn’t use to think the Spring xml files were that bad either, but now I really need to look into the Spring Java config API.
Who knows, I might even look into Ruby one of these days. (I would probably miss my type saftety though) 😉