Spring Boot Debate

Discussions center on the pros and cons of Spring Boot and Spring framework in Java development, including debates on its complexity, bloat, ease of use, modernity, and comparisons to alternatives like Quarkus, Dropwizard, or lighter frameworks.

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e.g JS OK EJB JPA JVM NPM AI SQL XML spring boot java xml framework config orm configs dependency annotations

Sample Comments

gloryjulio Jan 20, 2024 View on HN

Why not? Btw it's Spring Boot, not Spring. It's a nice streamlined package which is much more pleasant to use

strictfp May 22, 2017 View on HN

Why Spring Boot? Just curious. I work with it daily and have grown to detest it.

happyweasel Sep 23, 2020 View on HN

What are the advantages to ... let's say ... Spring Boot?

snambi Apr 9, 2017 View on HN

I used to like spring in favor of JEE Application servers. But of late, spring is getting too bloated, too complicated and buggy. OTOH, newer java frameworks are simpler and easier to work with. For example, spark application framework or retrofit for rest APIs. At this point spring is very similar to JEE.

nsxwolf Jan 13, 2022 View on HN

Modern Spring framework (annotation driven, no more XML config hell) offers a lot. Spring Boot is one of the easiest ways to start a backend Java app, microservice or monolith.You get ORM, a web framework, dependency injection, messaging, and a whole lot more just by including the modules you want. You can learn the basics in an afternoon of reading documentation. The major IDEs have very good plugins.A legacy Spring app can be absolute hell, though.That said, Angular (1.x) was the wors

signal11 Apr 11, 2022 View on HN

Spring vs “writing everything by hand” is a false dichotomy.

stevehiehn Feb 8, 2016 View on HN

Looks interesting! However i'm really not certain why anyone would not just use Spring-Boot.

peterashford Jun 7, 2015 View on HN

Nice job blaming all of Java for Spring's foibles

bm1362 Jul 1, 2017 View on HN

How is Java/Spring an issue here? Guess what powers Amazon, Google, Apple etc.

lmm Sep 22, 2020 View on HN

Spring boot specifically; regular Spring is relatively ok. I'm using it professionally at the moment. It's just impossible to find where anything is coming from or understand how your application is wired up, because everything magically appears based on what's on the classpath - it's like the COME FROM statement joke. Even just changing your dependency versions can suddenly radically change your application's behaviour (e.g. now it's suddenly running a webserver).