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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 pa

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.

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.