Several people have commented on my recent posting about Spring, and I want to make something clear: I'm not saying that Spring (or Hibernate, or EJB, or anything else) is a bad technology. I'm saying that walking up to every project, assuming that Spring will be THE answer, is bad. This kind of dogmatic approach--which, by the way, more than anything else is what led to the downfall of EJB as a popular technology--is bound to bite you in an uncomfortable place sooner or later.

One commenter, in particular, chastised me for not providing specific examples regarding where Spring may fail; I'm not going to stand here and make an exhaustive analysis of Spring's strengths and weaknesses. Besides being something that's already being done elsewhere, it would be beside the point that I'm trying to make--that dogma of any form is bad.

Look, so you've been successful with Spring on a few projects--that's good, and I encourage you to consider Spring again for your next couple. But don't make the dangerous assumption that using Spring will always yield success. In fact, let's take this out of the realm of Spring entirely and restate the point: "Look, so you've been successful with [[TECHNOLOGY-X]] on a few projects--that's good, and I encourage you to consider [[TECHNOLOGY-X]] again for your next couple. But don't make the dangerous assumption that using [[TECHNOLOGY-X]] will always yield success." (Where [[TECHNOLOGY-X]] can be, but isn't limited to, one of Spring, Hibernate, EJB, J2EE, COM+, WCF, CORBA, XML services, relational databases, stored procedures, managed-code-inside-the-database, highly denormalized relational data, highly normalized relational data, ....)