Spring.. why configuration in XML file format?

Starting with version 3.0, and further enhanced in 3.1, Spring now has complete support for Java-based configuration.

Xml was the de-facto method of specifying configuration when Spring was in its infancy. As of spring3, it is possible to use annotations instead of xml. However, you will still require to load the spring context first (using xml configuration file) and the rest of the spring based configuration would be loaded through the spring annotations.

Yes, you can specify the properties file separately for name-value pairs.

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