EJB hasn't been any more bloated than Spring (quite possibly less) since Java EE 5. Welcome to 2006.

I would totally disagree with you on that. If you use only the IOC controller for injecting your classes, maybe, Spring is not bloated, but also, its usefulness is not that great. But as soon as you begin to enter the wonderful spring-mvc world (which is the standard way to handle web apps using Spring), bloat is all around.

Take a look for example at the family of spring MVC controllers (http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/spr...) : before doing any development, should you have to study such a family to know which controller should fit everyone of your use cases ? That, for me is the very definition of bloat.

Furthermore, the documentation is terrible, IMHO. That said, I have been spoiled by months of Django development, maybe it is not that bad according to Java Standards.

More generally, the main problem with Java is the emphasis on architecture astronautism, not the language itself, which is ok, if not very powerful (no function as first class objects, really ? ).

I don't mind the core of spring but the full spring stack is nearly as bad as Java EE - I was reading through what was suppose to be a simple minimalist tutorial on how to implement CRUD operations in spring the other day and my jaw dropped at the amount of duplication, verbosity & incomprehensible config involved:

http://www.adobocode.com/spring/adding-crud-capability-to-sp...

I'm personally into much simpler stuff like Stripes & Guice.

I'm no fan of Spring, but I do want to echo your sentiment. There are a lot of really good Java libraries and frameworks that are often lumped together in people's view with the more verbose "enterprisey" concepts.

There are two things I really like about Java in the broad sense: the excellent Eclipse environment, and the multitude of quality open source libraries.