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For all the hate Spring gets, it’s extremely widely used in the enterprise. Not sure why? It can be a pain in the behind but once you learn the Spring way of d

For all the hate Spring gets, it’s extremely widely used in the enterprise. Not sure why? It can be a pain in the behind but once you learn the Spring way of doing things it ain’t so bad. Worked with a lot of frameworks and the fact is every requires you to learn the way to think about how to work with that framework

yen223 5y ago
If you absolutely positively need to use Java, usually because of talent reasons, Spring is one of the easiest ways to get a web service up quickly.
treeman79 5y ago
Went to a Spring conference a dozen years ago. It was positioned as Javas a answer to Ruby on Rails. Almost every speaker talked about they wished they could use ROR but work required Java. So this is that they could do. I could hear great pain leaking from their souls.
signal11 5y ago
Depends on the enterprise. We don’t use it and we’re pretty big. Many other teams here don’t, either. Some do — it’s a big place. I suspect a lot of enterprise devs inherit the decision, or move from project to project and don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and want a framework that’s portable (ie take their skills to another company), can hire for, etc. We don’t because managing our dependencies is important for us. Also we have a long-lived “product” codebase so keeping it simple pays off. Concrete advantages for us: Faster startup, smaller footprint, easier to reason about dependencies, and also the code is simpler, even for new joiners — anyone with a decent knowledge of Java will pick it up quickly. It doesn’t tick the “has worked on Spring” checkbox but it’s not like it’s made us unemployable. People do leave from time to time.
pritambarhate 5y ago
> For all the hate Spring gets, it’s extremely widely used in the enterprise. Not sure why? There are many people who don't have any problems with Spring. They might not love it but they don't hate it also. They just care about getting their tasks done and getting paid. They also don't hang around on the Hacker News or write blogs or tweet. so their point of view isn't discussed much.
- signal11 5y ago
  > There are many people who don't have any problems with Spring. They might not love it but they don't hate it also. A lot of “enterprise” developers don’t care. There are many reasons for this, some positive, some negative. But one outcome is that Spring becomes self perpetuating. Eg a new tech lead inherits a Spring project. Then at hiring time it becomes easier to ask for Spring experience. This drives an industry perception that you gotta know Spring. The costs — overly complicated code, ridiculous startup times & containerisation cost, messier dependencies, are often ignored or hand-waved away saying “this is the cost of enterprise”. (It’s not.) This is not to say Spring is inappropriate in an enterprise. What I am saying that many enterprise teams do not often have that cost/benefit conversation, instead they reflexively adopt Spring. That is the real problem.
- wink 5y ago
  I recently inherited some spring projects after not having worked with it in many, many years. Apart from "it's all still xml"... I don't see why it would be worse than other frameworks. This is not "spring is awesome" and this is not "I like it", but it's been easy to work with and I don't hate it... which means it's already better than 50% of all frameworks I've ever worked with (not only Java, actually many languagess)
GuB-42 5y ago
> For all the hate Spring gets, it’s extremely widely used in the enterprise. Not sure why? It mirrors the way the enterprise works, with a myriad of services where no one knows what the other is doing and that has to work together through some kind of magic. > Worked with a lot of frameworks and the fact is every requires you to learn the way to think about how to work with that framework It is not my experience. Only "action at a distance" type frameworks are like that, and Spring is all about that. Frameworks where you are mostly just calling functions are usually much easier to get into with just a bit of example code and manpage-like documentation.
elzbardico 5y ago
Usually, in the traditional enterprise, this kind of technical decision is not taken by the people who will have to actually use the tools. There are layers of technical decisions, progressively removed from the actual job of delivering applications. There are constraints like the utter horror enterprise has of the idea of NOT treating developers live commodity interchangeable cogs. There is careerism, there are outsourcing companies trying to position themselves as "specialists in X". There are naive technology executives and managers that are easily fooled by tool vendors promising the nirvana of code so easy to write that you could possibly fire all your experienced developers and hire some juniors folks out of a Bootcamp. There is the manager trying to be promoted by selling up this bullshit... And we could keep on discussing this for days, as the enterprise is an endless sea of cargo cults, insanity and sheer idiocy.

yen223 5y ago

If you absolutely positively need to use Java, usually because of talent reasons, Spring is one of the easiest ways to get a web service up quickly.

treeman79 5y ago

Went to a Spring conference a dozen years ago. It was positioned as Javas a answer to Ruby on Rails. Almost every speaker talked about they wished they could use ROR but work required Java. So this is that they could do. I could hear great pain leaking from their souls.

signal11 5y ago

Depends on the enterprise. We don’t use it and we’re pretty big. Many other teams here don’t, either. Some do — it’s a big place. I suspect a lot of enterprise devs inherit the decision, or move from project to project and don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and want a framework that’s portable (ie take their skills to another company), can hire for, etc. We don’t because managing our dependencies is important for us. Also we have a long-lived “product” codebase so keeping it simple pays off. Concrete advantages for us: Faster startup, smaller footprint, easier to reason about dependencies, and also the code is simpler, even for new joiners — anyone with a decent knowledge of Java will pick it up quickly. It doesn’t tick the “has worked on Spring” checkbox but it’s not like it’s made us unemployable. People do leave from time to time.

pritambarhate 5y ago

> For all the hate Spring gets, it’s extremely widely used in the enterprise. Not sure why? There are many people who don't have any problems with Spring. They might not love it but they don't hate it also. They just care about getting their tasks done and getting paid. They also don't hang around on the Hacker News or write blogs or tweet. so their point of view isn't discussed much.

signal11 5y ago
> There are many people who don't have any problems with Spring. They might not love it but they don't hate it also. A lot of “enterprise” developers don’t care. There are many reasons for this, some positive, some negative. But one outcome is that Spring becomes self perpetuating. Eg a new tech lead inherits a Spring project. Then at hiring time it becomes easier to ask for Spring experience. This drives an industry perception that you gotta know Spring. The costs — overly complicated code, ridiculous startup times & containerisation cost, messier dependencies, are often ignored or hand-waved away saying “this is the cost of enterprise”. (It’s not.) This is not to say Spring is inappropriate in an enterprise. What I am saying that many enterprise teams do not often have that cost/benefit conversation, instead they reflexively adopt Spring. That is the real problem.
wink 5y ago
I recently inherited some spring projects after not having worked with it in many, many years. Apart from "it's all still xml"... I don't see why it would be worse than other frameworks. This is not "spring is awesome" and this is not "I like it", but it's been easy to work with and I don't hate it... which means it's already better than 50% of all frameworks I've ever worked with (not only Java, actually many languagess)

GuB-42 5y ago

> For all the hate Spring gets, it’s extremely widely used in the enterprise. Not sure why? It mirrors the way the enterprise works, with a myriad of services where no one knows what the other is doing and that has to work together through some kind of magic. > Worked with a lot of frameworks and the fact is every requires you to learn the way to think about how to work with that framework It is not my experience. Only "action at a distance" type frameworks are like that, and Spring is all about that. Frameworks where you are mostly just calling functions are usually much easier to get into with just a bit of example code and manpage-like documentation.

elzbardico 5y ago

Usually, in the traditional enterprise, this kind of technical decision is not taken by the people who will have to actually use the tools. There are layers of technical decisions, progressively removed from the actual job of delivering applications. There are constraints like the utter horror enterprise has of the idea of NOT treating developers live commodity interchangeable cogs. There is careerism, there are outsourcing companies trying to position themselves as "specialists in X". There are naive technology executives and managers that are easily fooled by tool vendors promising the nirvana of code so easy to write that you could possibly fire all your experienced developers and hire some juniors folks out of a Bootcamp. There is the manager trying to be promoted by selling up this bullshit... And we could keep on discussing this for days, as the enterprise is an endless sea of cargo cults, insanity and sheer idiocy.