I recall when I started even with Rails pre Rails 2.0, the Spring framework was a horror show. Good luck with XML plumbing and then annotations wiring and then dependency injection container and AbstractBusinessProxyFascadSingletonFactory whereas in contrast, Rails seems light years ahead from controllers to templating to ORM.
Didn't downvote, but the constant mixing up of criticism against XML nonsense (justified) with criticism of annotations (why? Have so many people seen code bases that abuse them?) might be one reason.
