[mattmcknight]

I've done a ton of Java work, server side and desktop apps. What really amuses me about Java advocates is how they don't realize that the XML is not there for "configuration", it's there to form a dynamic (non-statically typed) appendage to the language. The trick of Spring and similar tools is that under the covers they use the reflection API. It's sort of a joke to claim that you are using static typing, when the config files are more or less a contained bit of dynamic typing.

[gaius]

Yeah... A lot of Java apps are really just runtimes for the actual app, which is written in a one-off language wrapped in XML tags.

[benmccann]

Java != XML

I code in Java all day every day and I haven't touched a line of XML in years.