[javajosh]

Yes, Spring is good, and in general there's been a lot of innovation started in Java and spread elsewhere. The whole "Dependency Injection" idea started in Java, and a lot more stuff started there too, or at least was popularized AFAIK. For example, pattern languages themselves. But some great libraries like JodaTime came from there, as did Doug Lea's very nice rendering of better concurrency primitives - and both of these ultimately got into the core library itself.

[noema]

Wasn't the "Gang of Four" book written entirely in C++?

[javajosh]

Yes; that's why I added the caveat "or popularized".