I think he's simply stating what has made many Java programmers very cynical about frameworks such as these. Java EE layers abstraction on top of abstraction. App servers like WebSphere use a ton of memory before you've even deployed your app to the server and they charge you an arm and a leg (yes I know glassfish and jboss are free). Java code is verbose and ill-suited to crafting systems which generate html. The Java enterprise camp was championing the idea that web applications should have JSP talking to session beans, which talk to entity beans which then talks to your actual data store. By the time you've coded it all up you realise that it's slow before you've even added any business logic. Things have improved since then, but they lost my trust a long time ago. Spring seems to love having programmers take java source and translating it into XML so it's much more verbose than java (quite a feat in itself) and hides some of the most critical code from the IDE. The "benefits" provided by such approaches are marginal at best. The ironic part... I'm a huge fan of Java the platform, just despise the culture of bloatware which has sprung up around it. The world is moving on to lightweight solutions which don't require app servers which generate stack traces so long that they span 3 screens.
While Scala is not a framework, it can be used with many Java libs. It isn't necessary to use xml-heavy frameworks and app servers to write "enterprise" apps. Endless layers of OR-mapping and xml is not productive. There are endless messaging and persistence solutions available without resorting to xml-obsessed JEE and Spring.
Sounds like the author doesn't understand concurrency or how to set up the unit tests from an IDE with a version of play framework which is only weeks away from being completely replaced.
