A New Era for Spring (Framework)

I'm not sure how many people are still using Spring. It was common everywhere I worked for a while, but today I see a lot more usage of Google's Guice.

I've had times when I wrote a lot of scripty things out of components which you would do with a script in Python (say run a lot of queries against a search engine and make a precision/recall curve) but in Java I might write components in Java and use a Spring XML file as the "script" that binds them together. Thus I felt Spring really filled a gap.

I think the web framework stuff in Spring is less interesting to people today because they are using JAXB. Then there are the hundred or so "Spring X" projects that I think are a real problem for Spring because (1) frequently they encapsulate worse practices instead of best practices, (2) they inhibit a general understanding of how Spring works (there is no subject where cut-and-paste and getting answers from StackOverflow will cause you more pain), (3) they confuse newcomers and make them not know where to start.