[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.