SpringLoaded is not a round-trip engineering tool. It is simply a project template with a kickstart script. It was inspired by AppFuse, but born out of the frustration in continuing development with AppFuse. Great software, but I felt it was always in my way afterwards.
I found myself getting fairly annoyed with the repetetive tasks of setting up a new web application in Java. Being a bit of a pragmatist I found myself using the same types of technologies that have served me well in the past. Hibernate, Struts, Spring, Middlegen, XDoclet, DisplayTag, ClickStream, OSCache, Quartz to name but a few.
Each of these tools solved a problem, but putting them all together whenever I started a new project was a bit of a daunting task each time. I found myself hunting through manuals and reading docs, etc. How do set this listener up again? What context parameters do I need for this? Where do I put this config file, etc. etc. All things that took time, and I'm pretty sure scares most developers away from doing things "properly".
After playing with AppFuse for a while, the thought of an Ant script setting up a project didn't seem like such a bad idea.