I found this very informative thread over on the serverside with the authors of Hivemind and Spring discussing the differences in their approaches. Scroll down past the hivemind announcement for the juicy stuff:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=28937
I would sum up the differences (and I'm interested in others opinions here) as follows:
Hivemind
- Configuration: has better support for strongly typed configuration with its excellent configuration point schema support. Spring only supports this via Map, List, and Properties.
- AOP Interceptors: has a less verbose syntax for configuring interceptors which I find more readable and correct (not directly exposing the target) than Spring's
- Hivedoc: a great way to visually see how all your dependencies wire up
Spring
- 3rd party support: Hibernate, iBatis, Struts, Transaction management, etc…
- Generic exception heirarchies: for example for data access
- Large user base