 <p>No major issues. Spring was particularly of benefit for:</p> <ul> <li>Making all the configuration plumbing consistent and straightforward</li> <li>Dependency Injection to support better factoring of code</li> <li>Declarative "Open Session In View" functionality for Hibernate</li> <li>Declarative Transaction Demarcation</li> <li>The Acegi (now Spring Security) project made it easy to integrate a custom security model</li> <li>The Spring data access support removes the need for a lot of boilerplate from any JDBC access - maybe not such a boost for Hibernate usage, but we had a mix of both. It also allows you to use JDBC &amp; Hibernate together fairly seamlessly</li> </ul>