[thegaulofthem]

Spring of a decade plus ago was fine, it just required a day or two of upstart to configure the whole deal if you weren’t already familiar and had a good project to reference as a basis for bootstrapping.

The tradeoff of today with Spring Boot is you might get bitten down the line with a little configuration mystery, although it’s such a well-blazed path you’re probably in good company and will find your error solved and documented.

In addition, it’s Java so virtually any serious task is done in a well-blazed fashion with numerous open-source options available. In contrast my Node library I used to generate and validate an XML document at work last month cannot read in its own XML output. It’s a boon for efficiency.

The only downside Java really has is that it’s a bit harder to “hack on” a dynamic, evolving JSON structure so it may be a bad fit for organizational reasons if your company lacks a cohesive, mature Engineering staff.

[chasd00]

my biggest gripe with old Spring was how far you had to go to get "hello world" on the browser when starting from zero. I never would have thought embedding the whole application server would be a good idea but SpringBoot proved me wrong. That plus the annotation based config vs xml files is what made fast development with Spring possible (in my mind).

Also, Spring would be a miserable experience if it were not for Maven/Gradle. Have you ever counted the jar files included in a typical SpringBoot+Spring-Security+Spring-Data app?

[lmm]

> my biggest gripe with old Spring was how far you had to go to get "hello world" on the browser when starting from zero. I never would have thought embedding the whole application server would be a good idea but SpringBoot proved me wrong. That plus the annotation based config vs xml files is what made fast development with Spring possible (in my mind).

All of this is long before Spring Boot. Embedding the web server so that your system is just a plain Java application is a great idea; annotation based config is a great idea; both of those are things you could do (and I did do) back in 2010 on Spring 3.3.

The stuff that Spring Boot adds - the spooky-action-at-a-distance classpath scanning, the we-can-use-them-but-you-can't annotations, the way you can't override part of an autoconfig but have to either accept what the library gives you or write a full config from scratch - is a big mistake. Those who forget Java EE are doomed to repeat it I guess.

> Also, Spring would be a miserable experience if it were not for Maven/Gradle.

Sure. "Have dependency management that doesn't suck" is good advice for any software ecosystem.

[matwood]

I think older spring was fine, but many people complain about xml configuration as a big one. And, like you said, it took time to setup. Spring Boot today with modern Java is a really nice backend environment to work in.