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Ask HN: Which Java framework will replace Spring?

• PaulHoule 10y ago
  (1) Spring is not as bad as you probably think. A few years ago I got thrown into the deep end of several large projects that involved Spring and found it was particularly painful. I got over it by reading the Spring manual cover to cover at the gym and then got confident enough to look at the source code and write my own extension modules. If you learn Spring by "making little changes to an existing codebase" and "looking up answers on Google and Stackoverflow" you are D00MED. If this is how people have been building your codebase, you are D0UBLE D00MED. If you understand how it works, it is not so bad. (2) Many of the alternatives are worse. I built a huge Silverlight GUI app before my recent Java Jag and initialization issues were a continuous pain in the ass. Every time we changed something about the app, the order in which things had to initialize in the app changed and things would break and we were always suffering. Spring figures out what depends on what and takes a big burden off your shoulders. Teardown was not such a big issue with that app, but I build a lot of data processing apps where teardown is critical or otherwise transactions don't get completed, data files are corrupted, and similarly Spring handles that for me. (3) The "Spring X" subframeworks are hit-or-miss, just as the many off-brand products that are sold under the "Microsoft" or "Oracle" brands. The real Spring Framework is excellent, but "Spring Batch" and "Spring Data" and many things like that tend to suck. (4) I'm building my own framework now that is starting to eat the Spring framework in my projects. The center of it is a system that converts RDF to Java data and converts Java data to RDF. With the backwards-chaining inference capabilities in RDF it is easy to do the topological sort and figure out which order things need to happen in. Unlike Spring this system is bidirectional (you can snapshot something that already exists) and you can use SPARQL to do queries of either the "system map" or the objects created from the "system map" and you can do all kinds of inference. You can even turn Spring bean descriptions to and from RDF (these are Java objects too) so one of the big questions is if and how much stuff from Spring we decide to incorporate into the system. Practically though I am using less Spring and more Turtle. We haven't made a hard decision about making this thing open source but we are learning in that direction. See http://ontology2.com/the-book/rdf-a-new-slant.html http://ontology2.com/the-book/rdf-a-new-slant.html
  • copperx 10y ago
    Thank you for your insight. I'm starting a web app in Java and I'm trying to find a suitable framework. Play was my first choice, but it look like there's so much magic behind the scenes. I'll probably pick Spring. What's the book that you suggest? Also, what do you think of Spring Boot?
    • davelnewton 10y ago
      "Too much magic"? That sounds more like a lack of understanding than anything else. There's no magic. The primary purpose of frameworks is to remove boilerplate and allow the developer to focus on what's actually important. There are many routes to this: convention, introspection, etc. The whole point of a framework is to appear "magical", but it's still just code, and ultimately, generally easy to pick apart how it does its magic. I'd even argue that gaining that understanding, and the ability to discover that understanding, is far more important than any particular framework: the understanding drives the ability to both make use of whatever framework you're investigating, but more interestingly, to apply that knowledge across frameworks and domains. If you want to "leapfrog" relatively "static" frameworks, you must understand how "magic" is constructed and utilized, and make use of it. At that point you might as well be using the framework. Leapfrogging demands new knowledge and new comfort levels.
• needusername 10y ago
  I agree with PaulHoule. I would add two things. First the focus on and support for testing in Spring is exceptional. Second the Spring Core courses used to be excellent and done by committers themselves. AFAIK this was outsourced and I don't know how their quality is these days. If you want to have a look at something else you may want to give Dagger 2 a shot. While I think it's a better, more idiomatic, approach to DI for Java you'll quickly become aware how limited it is compared to Spring. I built a small demo app and even for that I said to myself "gee I wish I had X from Spring" available about three times.