I had a developer at a client of ours (quite a large multinational) proof read some of the material for the upcoming Spring book. I introduced Spring there a couple of months ago and seems to do its job okay at quite some levels. I started introducing Spring on an internal tool used by both the development department and the departments responsible for operations and maintenance of several systems. I used Spring MVC in combination with SiteMesh and the remoting facilities Spring offers to create a pluggable web application that allows for the deployment of small pieces of functionality. (Of course 
) that proved to be quite easy.
More recently we also started to use some of the other Spring functionality. Traditionally, the company has a big investment in the database layer. Loads of stored procedures, triggers, views, etcetera. That’s probably not going to go away anytime soon. I also don’t really see that as a big problem. They really have a lot of database knowledge there and I’ve always been kind of the ‘right-tool-for-the-job’-person anyway. I had some of the guys have a peek at the book chapter regarding Spring JDBC (proof reading that is, but of course they also benefited quite a bit). I got some really good comments.
It’s really good to see how they’re starting to replace their proprietary JDBC frameworks with Spring JDBC and getting rid of practices that have been around for a long time (try/catch blocks all over the place, custom resource management and connection pools, custom transaction management or no transaction management at all). Also I was really amazed by the immediate creativity of some of the people. During a migration of a lot of data they immediately created this small main application, loading a Spring ApplicationContext with a transaction manager, datasource and a couple of custom DAOs. Fully unit-tested, it offered a really convenient way of doing such a migration.
Again, Spring made my day (and that of the client).
p.s. sorry about the positive rant, sometimes I just feel like shouting out loud that I like Spring
