Really interesting that you mentioned 2005. To me, this is the year that Java programming become extremely unpleasant. This was discussed a bit in a few earli

Really interesting that you mentioned 2005. To me, this is the year that Java programming become extremely unpleasant. This was discussed a bit in a few earlier threads... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2516940 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2516940 I actually think that at the time, the servlet spec, jsp, and jdbc were reasonably good, productive ways to write software. It was admittedly verbose and laborious compared to modern languages and frameworks like Rails or Django (I'd also agree it was verbose compared to PHP and Python at the time), but it wasn't a depressingly long setup that was hard to even contemplate for simple apps. It was only a little more complicated, and it did come with some benefits. My advice to programmers who are curious about what has become of Java is to go to the springsource home page, and work through the MVC tutorial. If you agree that this is a reasonable way to write software, then you'll disagree with me that web application with Spring has become too complicated. I actually think that if you were willing to go back to the original servlet spec, and use libraries, Java wouldn't be quite so bad. You can still pick and choose, and you're not at all obligated to use Spring. There are better MVC frameworks out there. To me, I don't really see the point, though. I know, there are problems that have already been solved, why re-solve them... I think maybe some people have more mental trouble with what another poster called "shoehorning your knowledge through the various abstractions of a framework" (I'm paraphrasing here). I've done this with Spring and Struts 2 (a different product entirely from Struts), and it was unpleasant. I've done this with Rails, and while I like Rails a lot and consider the trade-off worth it, I still never really felt in control (maybe I would if I used it more). If I use Java, I'd prefer to just go back to the 2004 days, write servlets, and build from there with libraries. I do like Dependency Injection, so I'd probably have to use some kind of framework - maybe Juice? But really, even though I prefer to be at a lower level and don't like frameworks, I think the future for people like me is Sinatra and/or webpy. Nothing really stopping me from doing more "low level" programming in those languages, trading efficiency for a code base that I really understand through and through. That said, the difference between that approach and Java circa-2004 isn't as great as the difference between, say, Rails and Spring. Once you need (or just want) to drop to a lower level of code, I really don't think Java is all that bad.