XML Glue

When I discovered XDoclet I quickly stopped editing my hibernate mapping documents by hand. From the XDoclet website:

XDoclet lets you apply Continuous Integration in component-oriented development. Developers should concentrate their editing work on only one Java source file per component.

This approach has several benefits:

1. You don't have to worry about out dating deployment meta-data whenever you touch the code. The deployment meta-data is continuously integrated.
2. Working with only one file per component gives you a better overview of what you're doing. If your component consists of several files, it's easy to lose track. If you have ever written an Enterprise Java Bean, you know what we mean. A single EJB can typically consists of 7 or more files. With XDoclet you only maintain one of them, and the rest is generated.
3. You dramatically reduce development time, and can concentrate on business logic, while XDoclet generates 85% of the code for you.

But unfortunately I still find myself editing a ridiculous amount of Spring XML by hand. Spring sounds nice in theory but after using it for awhile I don't think there's anything wrong with the factory and singleton patterns. This unholy quest for ultimate flexbility by gluing components together with XML has to stop. Most of the time you simply don't need it.