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, QuarĂ© 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) đŸ˜‰