This is really more of a philosophy/design issue. I did some work in Java back in the middle 90's and again in the early 2000's and now I'm coming back to it after spending a lot of time in C/C++ and it seems like there was an explosion of XML dependency while I was gone. Major build system tools like ant and maven depend on XML for their configuration, but I'm actually more concerned with all the frameworks, such as Spring, Hibernate, etc. My experience is that powerful supporting libraries like these are where a developer can really get leverage for building programs with lots of features without writing a lot of code, but it really seems like I'm getting one language for the price of two here. I write a bunch of Java classes, but then I also write a bunch of XML files to glue them together. The things that get done in the XML are things that I can see reasonable ways of doing in straight code without the middleman, and they don't really seem to be treated exactly like configuration files: they change rarely and they end up getting committed to source code control like the Java code itself, but they are distributed with the resulting application and need to be unpacked and installed in the classpath in order to get the application to work. I'm working with server applications that are not web-based, so maybe the domain is a bit different from what most people are doing, but I just can't help feeling that I must be doing something wrong here. Can someone point me to a good source of information for why these design choices were made and what problems they are meant to solve so that I can analyze my own experiences in this context?
