Thanks for your input. Mostly all the things you mentioned are pretty much simplified with JEE5 as well. I guess that has to do for the most part that much of the specification made use of things that were found to be useful in both Spring and Hibernate to meet the ease of use mandate. I'm not too sure on AOP though.
I must say in addition that the tooling support especially in NB is amazing when integrating with GF. Although I'm finding the latest version NB to be a bit unstable hopefully these bugs will be resolved soon.
I definitely want/need to ramp up on Spring so I'm sure I will be finding many similarities.
Thanks for your responses. Greatly appreciated.
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