3 ms·

One of the reasons I think the standard Java project became too complex. Java + Tomcat is simple, lightweight, powerful and fast. When Java + Maven + Spring +

by rb808 11y ago

One of the reasons I think the standard Java project became too complex. Java + Tomcat is simple, lightweight, powerful and fast. When Java + Maven + Spring + Hibernate + JUnit + Jenkins became the default, it really became much harder to learn, slower to do anything and generally frustrating.

kisamoto 11y ago
This. Java is an excellent battle ready language that stable components in a business can be ported into with excellent test coverage and the power of all the mature libraries and tools. However in a startup where maybe the end goal isn't completely defined yet; there is prototyping code to see if it will eventually get used and plenty of LoC being thrown away, wrestling with added libraries and even the compile & deploy time of Spring + Tomcat can really slow development and increase complexity breeding frustration.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  Just my recollections of java dev from about 2yrs ago... Maven was complex, with too many 'concepts' for a build system. It was a revelation when I discovered dependency download and jar creation through apache ivy. Did Gradle take off? Tomcat in turn had problems too, I recall JBoss was a little more robust, but also complex. I also found hibernate/spring to be confounded by differences between versions - the XML config (of which there was a lot) tended to change in format quite a bit, and there was an added complexity in figuring out how to get code, and xml, or even code-from-xml to behave intuitively. It felt like a massive ORM, written in XML and annotated java...
thescribe 11y ago
This is a huge part of it. I was a Java programmer for almost ten years, and it is wholly opinion but most of those tools are inelegant and cumbersome. I realized most of the code I was writing was boilerplate or even worse, XML configuration of code.

3 ms·

One of the reasons I think the standard Java project became too complex. Java + Tomcat is simple, lightweight, powerful and fast. When Java + Maven + Spring +

by rb808 11y ago

kisamoto 11y ago
This. Java is an excellent battle ready language that stable components in a business can be ported into with excellent test coverage and the power of all the mature libraries and tools. However in a startup where maybe the end goal isn't completely defined yet; there is prototyping code to see if it will eventually get used and plenty of LoC being thrown away, wrestling with added libraries and even the compile & deploy time of Spring + Tomcat can really slow development and increase complexity breeding frustration.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  Just my recollections of java dev from about 2yrs ago... Maven was complex, with too many 'concepts' for a build system. It was a revelation when I discovered dependency download and jar creation through apache ivy. Did Gradle take off? Tomcat in turn had problems too, I recall JBoss was a little more robust, but also complex. I also found hibernate/spring to be confounded by differences between versions - the XML config (of which there was a lot) tended to change in format quite a bit, and there was an added complexity in figuring out how to get code, and xml, or even code-from-xml to behave intuitively. It felt like a massive ORM, written in XML and annotated java...
thescribe 11y ago
This is a huge part of it. I was a Java programmer for almost ten years, and it is wholly opinion but most of those tools are inelegant and cumbersome. I realized most of the code I was writing was boilerplate or even worse, XML configuration of code.