In this blog, I’ll outline why learning and mastering Spring Boot in 2023 is a worthwhile endeavor, even though there may be a few differing opinions. I’ll also explore how Spring Boot compares to other backend technologies and alternative Java frameworks.
While you are mastering Spring, I am mastering libraries that do the thing my program needs to do.
While you are trying to debug to your Spring app, which is a huge PITA because Spring is a rat’s nest of conflicting configuration paradigms and overlays and fills your call stack with dozens of layers of generated methods, I have finished my work and am
at the beachhelping my coworker debug his Spring app because he didn’t listen to me when I said not to use Spring.Just out of curiosity, why do you find debugging in spring a huge PITA? Also what do you mean by conflicting config paradigms?
Genuinely curious.
Spring combines combinations of environment variables, system properties, files, and classpath resources, and handles a variety of patterns (e.g.: aConfigOption could be configured by system property
A_CONFIG_OPTION
,aConfigOption
, or several other possibilities), so tracking down where the configuration came from is not always easy. Sometimes you think you can just set a property, but it turns out another property triggers loading a resource that overrides yours. This would be fine if applications/libraries clearly documented how to configure them, but most say “config via spring, good luck lol”.And good luck if you are trying to use two different components both built on Spring, and they both rely on the dependency injector settings “db.url”. Now you have to start playing games with dependency injector scopes.