[tonyarkles]

Heh, my personal complaint about Spring comes from the other side of this. I came into a company where Spring Boot was already deeply entrenched, in a Senior DevOps/Sysadmin type of role. I spent a significant amount of time untangling all of the voodoo reflection magic that the teams who had created the services couldn't seem to debug on their own.

To be fair to Spring Boot, the developers in question didn't have any real operations mentality, which complicated things. A service would crash/500 and would have a 0-byte log file documenting everything that led to the crash. It was pretty surpassing though to discover that a lot of the visibility things I'd come to expect from the large variety of other non-Java frameworks didn't seem to be included by default (eg request logging/exception logging) and had to be turned on explicitly.

[re-thc]

> Heh, my personal complaint about Spring comes from the other side of this.

What did your example have to do with Spring? It sounds like it'd have been the same if replaced with something else. It was the developers...

[throwaway290]

Just like the original comment praising Spring, too. It's always the developers. Whether you use one framework or another or nothing.

[tonyarkles]

Mostly that the whole annotation-based dependency injection part can be a mess to debug and that it seemed to (at the time, unsure about the present) have very odd defaults around logging.

The annotation-based DI seemed to do a really good job of turning what should have been a compile-time error into a runtime exception instead.

[re-thc]

> Mostly that the whole annotation-based dependency injection part

Right, but DI isn't Spring specific, so point still holds.

Within Java there are plenty of other annotation frameworks...

In other languages there are annotation usages and sometimes EVEN worse behavior exists...

And yet for reasons I'd like to know people aren't blaming those (at least not in the same capacity). That's the crux of the issue.

[tonyarkles]

I'm explaining why I have had a bad experience with Spring. Spring is the only framework I've used that does weird stuff with annotation-based DI and can silently fail in production by default due to those annotations not being resolved correctly at runtime (heck, even if they can't be resolved at compile-time, please make them fail at startup instead of later!).

I've had other issues with other non-Java frameworks too, but I'm not giving a comprehensive write-up of the pros and cons of every web framework I've ever used here... just pointing out the pain points I had with Spring.

I also didn't mention LOMBOK because that doesn't seem like it's necessarily part of Spring by default but wow did that also prove to be another source of painful bugs.

[literallyroy]

Spent a good day debugging, to learn that some (most?) annotations don’t work when the method is called from inside the same class (no proxy is setup).