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Comment by bjoernw | Hacker News Reader

How is Spring Boot "enterprisey"? It makes modern java programming simpler and more accessible by hiding some of the unnecessary complexity. It enables things like https://jhipster.github.io/ which to me is the Rails equivalent in the java world.

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JHipster equivalent to Rails? You have to be joking, surely. I just setup a JHipster site and when I opened it up in IntelliJ it was the same labyrinthine mess I've come to expect from Java frameworks, ie. knee-deep in endless subdirectories and everything abstracted away to the point of incomprehension. Contrast that with the simplicity of Ruby and Rails. Java by its very nature makes it impossible to build simple, easily comprehended frameworks and apps. The trouble is that devs who have spent most of their lives in the Java ecosystem can only think relatively, ie. Java Framework X is simpler than Java Framework Y. Unless they expose themselves to something like Ruby or Clojure they will never experience true simplicity.

This is non-sense, something like Spring boot is easy to comprehend, there's no labyrinthine mess whatsoever. You've got the choice to use other simple frameworks like Spark, or plain libs like Jersey + Jackson. All in all it's still the same, you write your Controller, your services and that's it. Where is that complicated?

And I'm a big fan of Clojure, but it's not because Clojure is cool that Java becomes de-facto a big pile of poo. People have been drilled by so much FUD about Javaland that they simply can't stand to try it correctly without preconceptions.

I didn't say equivalent in general. I said equivalent in the Java world where we are more used to having to deal with bloat. Just free yourself from your preconceptions and run ./gradlew . Everything will start up fine, no mess, I promise.

> hiding complexity

This makes me shiver in terror.

Our job as programmers is to hide complexity and expose it when needed. Nothing to shiver about.

Spring Boot hides needing to deploy to an application server along with the extra configuration that entails, it doesn't hide Spring from you.

There's still a ton of "enterprise-grade" shit in Spring, you just aren't forced to use it if you don't want - but it's always there, lurking behind the scenes.

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