[KronisLV]

Spring Boot is indeed quite usable! I'd compare it to something like modern ASP.NET, good runtime performance, okay ecosystem, good tooling, okay languages.

The old Spring, not so much - I've never had a bare Spring project that was pleasant to work with, especially when you don't have embedded Tomcat and the application server is configured separately from the deployable .war or whatever, what a mess. Thankfully, you can put those legacy projects into containers and make things slightly more palatable.

That said, even Spring Boot can feel a bit much sometimes, something like Dropwizard is still very idiomatic as far as the Java ecosystem is concerned and is both stable and usable in those cases: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/stable/ (not as fancy as Vert.X or Quarkus or whatever, but it's been around for a while and is decently documented)

[neonsunset]

ASP.NET Core + ecosystem of packages for it are likely more comparable to Active-J and Vert.X in terms of focus on reducing boilerplate and offering good performance. There are more similarities in the API esp. with minimal API within the former. It is a much more focused package and Spring Boot performance really isn't up to par vs all these.

[dhosek]

Yeah, I’ve done Spring stuff for the last 16 years, going from XML config (which, frankly, was nice in that there was a central place to see the structure of the app) to the more modern Java/annotation/magic-based config. I find it very intuitive and straightforward to set up, Spring Data is damn near magical and at one point, the app that I joked about (three lines of Java, 20 lines of annotations) became reality for a program that was populating RabbitMQ from change data written to a DB2 table.

Maybe it’s because my programming days date back to the era of 7-bit ASCII and every language implementation was a little different from the others in what aspects and extensions of the language it provided, but I find Java/Spring a pretty comfortable place to work (which is not to say that I eschew other languages). In general, I find that most of the time when developers express hate for a language or platform it really boils down to: “this isn’t what I’m used to and I don‘t want to change.”