Java alphabet soup

Java alphabet soup

Trying a Java refresher, more specifically a Spring refresher, has so far been a source of mixed emotions. Having written a lot of Core Java in the past and used a smattering of Spring, the utility of either wasn't in question in my head. But then having developed tons of Ruby on Rails apps, and seen both its magic and seamy sides, my perspective perhaps has more dimensions to it today.

I found the Java / Spring way of developing web applications a little too archaic by today's standards. All the annotations have still not exorcised much of the esoteric XML that you still cannot avoid. But Eclipse provides significant relief to the extent that you can get away without writing perhaps a single line of XML, using its Maven and Spring (Spring Tools Suite / Web Tools Platform) plugins instead to add most of the XML content.

You still need to manually configure Tomcat, manually configure data sources and JNDI for accessing your data sources in server specific ways. You still have to manually configure your web.xml. Those are hard, and you have to know at least what to search for in google, and then what to search for in the documentation that google lists. It is frustrating if you don't have a very good, precise tutorial or howto. It all shows the struggles of an old and evolving framework in trying to remain usable even as it remains solidly relevant. I suspect Spring Boot, something I am yet to explore, would bear signs of some true-north evolution. In the meantime, one hopes Java comes up with more modern web frameworks. Spring is mature, stable, mildly usable and very useful. But it feels a decade behind. Spring addressed usability problems of Java EE. But today, something else needs to do that for Spring. Spring Boot may be an evolutionary step in that direction, but more needs to be done.