re: tribal knowledge, what I've found in the Rails world is that much of the "getting started" process stuff was forged around one tech stack early on, and often one editor that everyone used (based on having watched a video).
When Spring started, there was already a myriad ways of doing stuff, and multiple IDEs, and multiple use cases for Java itself, and Spring was trying to answer a lot more up front.
If you're doing 'web' in Java (something I still think much of the java world still doesn't really 'get'), there are dozens of choices/options/etc. If, in 2006, you were planning to do 'web' and wanted to use Ruby... the primary choice was Rails. If you were doing 'web' and wanted to use Python... you similarly have often only had one or two major choices (I'd argue 'Zope' early on, then Django as a default go-to for the last 10 years or so). In the Java world... way too many choices up front, all answering similar problems, but slightly differently.
While Ruby was out before Rails, their popularity generally rose in tandem, and much of the tooling for the ecosystem seemed to develop in tandem during the progression of Rails itself.
Had Spring started in 1997, we might have seen a somewhat different trajectory re: choice/tooling/community/etc.
When Spring started, there was already a myriad ways of doing stuff, and multiple IDEs, and multiple use cases for Java itself, and Spring was trying to answer a lot more up front.
If you're doing 'web' in Java (something I still think much of the java world still doesn't really 'get'), there are dozens of choices/options/etc. If, in 2006, you were planning to do 'web' and wanted to use Ruby... the primary choice was Rails. If you were doing 'web' and wanted to use Python... you similarly have often only had one or two major choices (I'd argue 'Zope' early on, then Django as a default go-to for the last 10 years or so). In the Java world... way too many choices up front, all answering similar problems, but slightly differently.
While Ruby was out before Rails, their popularity generally rose in tandem, and much of the tooling for the ecosystem seemed to develop in tandem during the progression of Rails itself.
Had Spring started in 1997, we might have seen a somewhat different trajectory re: choice/tooling/community/etc.