[ljm]

I never hated Spring, I got used to working with it. I found the annotation-based approach to configuring classes really opaque though, and it was hard to understand how to configure things because those were also magic annotations, and then some things were beans and others weren't and... ugh.

I don't fault Spring for it, and we were on Java 11 back then with just a little bit of new hotness. Java itself just didn't lend itself to the best ergonomics.

And you could fault Ruby or any dynamic language for the same, but they usually save you a little bit of overhead or boilerplate.

[StevePerkins]

I'm always interested in hearing people's alternatives. Modern C# and ASP.NET is likewise annotation based. Most contemporary Python frameworks heavily leverage decorators, which is just another name for annotations. Decorators have made their way into Typescript. Rust code is chock full of attributes, and I've even seen Golang libraries simulate annotations with the `reflect` package.

This never really sounds like a Spring or Java thing. It always sounds like a "not liking dependency-injection as a general pattern" thing. My issue with that is two-fold: (1) people should just say that, and not tie it specifically to any one stack, and (2) the alternatives seem to be either monkeypatching or else writing untestable code, and those alternatives are hardly any better.

[ljm]

I'm not saying annotations are bad though, I'm saying Spring's over-reliance on them makes the code harder to follow. Some of those annotations are actually done at compile-time via Lombok, which makes it even harder to know what the hell is happening.

Decorators and annotations are essentialy higher-order functions and higher-order classes, but there is nothing about them that makes it intuitive. They actually become quite difficult to write and much harder to debug, OOP's shit version of a monad.

[Tainnor]

Dependency injection is fine, but it doesn't need to be as heavy as it is in Spring. There are lightweight and compile-time safe dependency-injection frameworks, and it's not even that hard to write your own custom dependency-injection logic.

[ackfoobar]

I was once dropped into a Spring codebase. I consider myself a decent programmer, but I couldn't navigate it at all. Other than that time I've been able to avoid magical frameworks in my career.

But I do want to learn Spring. What material would you recommend?

[cgh]

Not to be glib or state the obvious but the Spring project has excellent docs: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/reference/index.html

[krooj]

Spring In Action. Not Spring Boot in Action - Spring. https://www.manning.com/books/spring-in-action-fifth-edition