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How do you feel about Spring? I'm a fan of Java itself as well, but find myself conflicted whenever I use Spring/Boot. It's very nice when it works. But when t

How do you feel about Spring? I'm a fan of Java itself as well, but find myself conflicted whenever I use Spring/Boot. It's very nice when it works. But when the magic formula isn't recited correctly....you get frustrated and wind up visiting HN to forget about how unpleasant it is. ahem

jimbokun 8y ago
Spring is obsessed with using anything but actual Java code to express business logic in Java programs. XML bean configuration files. Annotations. Implicit code generation. Property and YAML files. Looking for files and resources in "default" locations. Executing code at runtime as the result of adding a dependency, without it ever being explicitly called anywhere. The result is, you can never really predict what the hell your program is going to do when its running in production. Certainly not by carefully reading and inspecting the Java code you write.
pjmlp 8y ago
I think that it brought a good competition against JEE (back when it was still J2EE), however I would still just use JEE for Java Web projects.
- dajohnson89 8y ago
  Just curious -- why?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Short answer, experience and employers. My experience doing Web development in Java started with joining a team that was ramping up a project on WebSphere 5.1, alongside a migration from BEA WebLogic. I went through a couple of WebSphere, JBoss and TomcatEE versions up to JEE 6, was the technical lead for an in-house JSF framework built on top of RichFaces, and on very last JEE project used PrimeFaces. All the employers that I worked for, mostly used JEE stacks for their Java projects. Spring was the exception, rather than the norm. Additionally, even if a bit slowly, many of the Spring improvements ended up in JEE and Spring also supports the JSR related to JEE anyway. Nowadays I live in the .NET world, and the Java teams next door are happily delivering JEE based solutions. So if I was suddenly asked to architect a Java based solution, naturally it would be JEE based.

jimbokun 8y ago

Spring is obsessed with using anything but actual Java code to express business logic in Java programs. XML bean configuration files. Annotations. Implicit code generation. Property and YAML files. Looking for files and resources in "default" locations. Executing code at runtime as the result of adding a dependency, without it ever being explicitly called anywhere. The result is, you can never really predict what the hell your program is going to do when its running in production. Certainly not by carefully reading and inspecting the Java code you write.

pjmlp 8y ago

I think that it brought a good competition against JEE (back when it was still J2EE), however I would still just use JEE for Java Web projects.

dajohnson89 8y ago
Just curious -- why?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Short answer, experience and employers. My experience doing Web development in Java started with joining a team that was ramping up a project on WebSphere 5.1, alongside a migration from BEA WebLogic. I went through a couple of WebSphere, JBoss and TomcatEE versions up to JEE 6, was the technical lead for an in-house JSF framework built on top of RichFaces, and on very last JEE project used PrimeFaces. All the employers that I worked for, mostly used JEE stacks for their Java projects. Spring was the exception, rather than the norm. Additionally, even if a bit slowly, many of the Spring improvements ended up in JEE and Spring also supports the JSR related to JEE anyway. Nowadays I live in the .NET world, and the Java teams next door are happily delivering JEE based solutions. So if I was suddenly asked to architect a Java based solution, naturally it would be JEE based.