If you are using Spring only for dependency injection (DI), you should consider using or at least testing Google Guice. It is an DI framework based on Java 5 annotations and completely avoids the usage of XML. This way, you will get all the benefits of type safety, compile time checking, ...
But I'm sure, that the time has come, that the Java people have a lesson learned: XML is just a good replacement for binary files and protocols, but not in any way a (source) language for programming or configuring.