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You know what should be taking care of all of these things? Java! For a language that bills itself as the "enterprise language #1", it's abysmal in supporting a

You know what should be taking care of all of these things? Java! For a language that bills itself as the "enterprise language #1", it's abysmal in supporting actual enterprise features like you listed above in a lightweight fashion. Instead, a whole third-party framework has to be tacked on just so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Java doesn't even support dependency injection, something that I would consider an absolute minimum for even a small project.

diroussel 6y ago
The real thing that is missing is a runtime annotation scanning API. Spring does this my examining the class path, casting it to a urlclasspath, finding all the zip/jar files, unzipping them and then parsing the byte code. Interestingly the set let spec added annotation scanning too. And now if your not careful you jar files get extracted three times. The JVM, the server conteainer and spring all repeating the same work. No wonder people think java is slow to start up.
dmux 6y ago
>Java doesn't even support dependency injection, something that I would consider an absolute minimum for even a small project. For small projects, DI is easy done by passing things via the constructor. If multiple things need to get wired together, pull that wiring logic out into its own class or method (FooBuilder.buildDefault()). If things start to get tedious, that's a really good time to stop and reflect on the design choices. That stop-and-reflect opportunity if often lost when things can be simply AutoWired together.
jacques_chester 6y ago
Jakarta (née Java EE) has CDI, which bears a striking similarity to the Spring's dependency injection capability: http://cdi-spec.org/ http://cdi-spec.org/
cryptos 6y ago
I don't think there is a need to blur the line between a standard library and frameworks. Maybe @Inject should have been in the JDK, but on the other hand it can be added to any project easily and is supported by several frameworks. In general I think, it is wise to keep the standard library small, because innovations are easier to implement in libraries. Rust is a good example for this style.
- lmm 6y ago
  If Java had had first-class functions to start with, things like Spring would probably have never got off the ground. Up until Java 8 you couldn't even pass a reference to a constructor as an argument without defining a whole class to carry it around in.
  - cryptos 6y ago
    But first-class function is a completely different thing than dependency injection (DI). Supporting functional programming is a an aspect of the programming language itself, while DI is part of the infrastructure. I agree with you, that Java should have had first-class function from day one. Ironically this was considered by the language designers, but they decided that it would be too exotic for the average Joe. OOP was a hype back then ...
    - lmm 6y ago
      DI is a design technique, you don't have to use a framework to implement it. Reflection-based frameworks became a popular way of doing it in Java because doing it in plain Java is cumbersome, and that's due to the limitations of Java as a language.

diroussel 6y ago

The real thing that is missing is a runtime annotation scanning API. Spring does this my examining the class path, casting it to a urlclasspath, finding all the zip/jar files, unzipping them and then parsing the byte code. Interestingly the set let spec added annotation scanning too. And now if your not careful you jar files get extracted three times. The JVM, the server conteainer and spring all repeating the same work. No wonder people think java is slow to start up.

dmux 6y ago

>Java doesn't even support dependency injection, something that I would consider an absolute minimum for even a small project. For small projects, DI is easy done by passing things via the constructor. If multiple things need to get wired together, pull that wiring logic out into its own class or method (FooBuilder.buildDefault()). If things start to get tedious, that's a really good time to stop and reflect on the design choices. That stop-and-reflect opportunity if often lost when things can be simply AutoWired together.

jacques_chester 6y ago

Jakarta (née Java EE) has CDI, which bears a striking similarity to the Spring's dependency injection capability: http://cdi-spec.org/ http://cdi-spec.org/

cryptos 6y ago

I don't think there is a need to blur the line between a standard library and frameworks. Maybe @Inject should have been in the JDK, but on the other hand it can be added to any project easily and is supported by several frameworks. In general I think, it is wise to keep the standard library small, because innovations are easier to implement in libraries. Rust is a good example for this style.

lmm 6y ago
If Java had had first-class functions to start with, things like Spring would probably have never got off the ground. Up until Java 8 you couldn't even pass a reference to a constructor as an argument without defining a whole class to carry it around in.
- cryptos 6y ago
  But first-class function is a completely different thing than dependency injection (DI). Supporting functional programming is a an aspect of the programming language itself, while DI is part of the infrastructure. I agree with you, that Java should have had first-class function from day one. Ironically this was considered by the language designers, but they decided that it would be too exotic for the average Joe. OOP was a hype back then ...
  - lmm 6y ago
    DI is a design technique, you don't have to use a framework to implement it. Reflection-based frameworks became a popular way of doing it in Java because doing it in plain Java is cumbersome, and that's due to the limitations of Java as a language.