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I really enjoy using spring boot. My problem with Spring is that it feels like I’m mostly metaprogramming with annotations. Also I hate that I need to literall

I really enjoy using spring boot. My problem with Spring is that it feels like I’m mostly metaprogramming with annotations. Also I hate that I need to literally use a program to create the boilerplate for a new spring app. And I can’t run my program without special IDE settings.

tetraca 7y ago
Weird, I've never really needed to use special IDE settings for my Spring boot projects at all; I can just gradle run my project, maybe with a different profile set in the environment.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  This works for me most of the time. I use a program to generate the build.gradle, and then that file builds my project through my IDE. It’s meta all the way down.
tonyarkles 7y ago
I admittedly didn’t spend a whole lot of time with Spring Boot; I mostly did Ops with projects other teams build with the occasional Dev assistance when they painted themselves into a corner. But I’m hoping you might be able to help with a question I haven’t had much of an answer to: I agree there’s a lot of “metaprogramming with annotations”, but I didn’t ever find a great way to dig into an annotation and figure out what the hell it was actually doing, or how. Do you have any pointers for pulling back the curtain? Edit: for example, Python “annotations” are generally just functions that return wrapped functions/attributes/classes/whatever. Java annotations seem significantly more “magical” than that.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Java annotations are meta-data, they don't do anything. Actual code which uses those annotations is located elsewhere. Usually you can use "Find usages" for a given annotation to find the actual code.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    That's what I figured... it seemed like a lot of things didn't really take effect until something else happened at runtime. It seemed to me (as a seasoned developer with almost no Spring Boot experience) that there was a lot of mysterious magic there that was great until it didn't work, and then it turned into a debugging nightmare (e.g. stack traces that don't, at all, mention the code where the error exists).
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      I, personally, despite modern trends, don't like Spring Boot. It was never a big issue for me to configure required beans manually. Spring Core reference has all the necessary examples to cover it. I guess, Spring Boot makes sense, when you're producing a lot of little web applications with microservice architecture, so copying over that manual configurations can become burden. My applications are monolith and last for many years, so it's not an issue for me to spend some time configuring everything as I need it and it's always visible and obvious what's happening.
topspin 7y ago
If, like 99% of Spring Boot use cases, you're implementing "microservices" you should look into Javalin[1]. Javalin will forever sour you to Spring Boot the first time you try it. No annotations in sight, no code generation, no special IDE support involved, no multi-page stack traces, no POM gymnastics, no magic. With Java 11 type inference the boilerplate is reduced to near parity with Kotlin. [1] https://javalin.io/ https://javalin.io/
oauea 7y ago
None of those things are true. For example for a rest service, https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/ https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/ has everything you need to get started. A simple pom with a few dependencies, and a main class that invokes SpringApplication.run. You can just invoke this main class from your IDE like any other java application.

tetraca 7y ago

Weird, I've never really needed to use special IDE settings for my Spring boot projects at all; I can just gradle run my project, maybe with a different profile set in the environment.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
This works for me most of the time. I use a program to generate the build.gradle, and then that file builds my project through my IDE. It’s meta all the way down.

tonyarkles 7y ago

I admittedly didn’t spend a whole lot of time with Spring Boot; I mostly did Ops with projects other teams build with the occasional Dev assistance when they painted themselves into a corner. But I’m hoping you might be able to help with a question I haven’t had much of an answer to: I agree there’s a lot of “metaprogramming with annotations”, but I didn’t ever find a great way to dig into an annotation and figure out what the hell it was actually doing, or how. Do you have any pointers for pulling back the curtain? Edit: for example, Python “annotations” are generally just functions that return wrapped functions/attributes/classes/whatever. Java annotations seem significantly more “magical” than that.

vbezhenar 7y ago
Java annotations are meta-data, they don't do anything. Actual code which uses those annotations is located elsewhere. Usually you can use "Find usages" for a given annotation to find the actual code.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  That's what I figured... it seemed like a lot of things didn't really take effect until something else happened at runtime. It seemed to me (as a seasoned developer with almost no Spring Boot experience) that there was a lot of mysterious magic there that was great until it didn't work, and then it turned into a debugging nightmare (e.g. stack traces that don't, at all, mention the code where the error exists).
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    I, personally, despite modern trends, don't like Spring Boot. It was never a big issue for me to configure required beans manually. Spring Core reference has all the necessary examples to cover it. I guess, Spring Boot makes sense, when you're producing a lot of little web applications with microservice architecture, so copying over that manual configurations can become burden. My applications are monolith and last for many years, so it's not an issue for me to spend some time configuring everything as I need it and it's always visible and obvious what's happening.

topspin 7y ago

If, like 99% of Spring Boot use cases, you're implementing "microservices" you should look into Javalin[1]. Javalin will forever sour you to Spring Boot the first time you try it. No annotations in sight, no code generation, no special IDE support involved, no multi-page stack traces, no POM gymnastics, no magic. With Java 11 type inference the boilerplate is reduced to near parity with Kotlin. [1] https://javalin.io/ https://javalin.io/

oauea 7y ago

None of those things are true. For example for a rest service, https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/ https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service/ has everything you need to get started. A simple pom with a few dependencies, and a main class that invokes SpringApplication.run. You can just invoke this main class from your IDE like any other java application.