3 ms·

In my first project at Pivotal Labs, I worked on what I believe was the first production system based on Spring Boot. Afterwards I and my peers were asked to gi

In my first project at Pivotal Labs, I worked on what I believe was the first production system based on Spring Boot. Afterwards I and my peers were asked to give feedback. I didn't really get the fuss and a lot of our vibe was "why isn't this more like Rails?" Later I worked on a Spring 3 project. It was a very well-written monolith, all the best practices up to that generation, layers and services and repositories, the whole shebang. Yet various things about it were flatly painful. That's the experience that made me understand why Spring Boot is actually a Really Big Deal. These days if I am going to write a general consumer-facing app, I'm perfectly happy with Spring Boot, especially if Kotlin is in frame. A lot of Pivotal Labs projects now use Boot+Kotlin as their default starting point and many folks see the virtues. It's not Rails, it never will be. But on the other hand: It's not Rails, it never will be.

soulnothing 8y ago
I started on spring 2. I was working concurrently on django, spring 2, and flask. Spring was just painful, we were using xml definitions for alot of stuff. I changed it over to class configuration but still. I was running a meetup tonight, and going over spring boot on kotlin. It felt so heavy to me. I've had this thought too why not like X. Spring has a really great ecosystem around it. I sort of look at it like the AWS of web frameworks. It has practically the kitchen sink in it. I've switched over to Kotlin. While I gravitated more to I think the sinatra style. I went from Spark -> Jooby -> now Ktor/Vert.x. Vert.x is like a breath of fresh air. I have never felt more liberated writing a backend. Combining that with Kotlin multiplatform and ktor for the js clients. Is so dead simple.