[jacques_chester]

The Struts vulnerability was less about Struts and more about the universal difficulty of dependency management.

Which Spring Boot ameliorates by providing starter POMs. Curated, levelled, updated collections of dependencies for common cases. No need to play whack-a-dep with Maven or Gradle. No need to track 50 different dependencies yourself.

The thing is: I don't care how Spring does the magic. I care that I don't have to care.

I came to Spring and Java-for-real development relatively late -- by fluke I was on what is almost certainly the first Boot production app ever deployed, back in early 2014.

Later I got a chance to see the primordial world of Spring 3. I understand the residual hate.