Good observation, I've read several posts which complain about factories and proxies. With Grails (which can be all Java no Groovy if you want), Zk, GWT, etc. I can do powerful web apps. No EJB and no Spring needed.
Yes but I don't recall having to do anything directly with it so the reference is good for me. If I need logging I expect it to work not worry that some bean config file isn't set up right. If the Grails developers found Spring helped them, cool, as long as I don't have to deal with it.
