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> At the very least, when you say "Rails X.0", you've described all the major pieces of the stack, and the IDE is immaterial. That is simply not the case in the Java world.

Of course the IDE is immaterial. I understand that developing in a stack that you are familiar with is much simpler for anyone but people could make similar claims in support of Java+Spring.

That being said, if you are forced into this by your company, I think that stepping back from this would help you a lot.

The IDE is absolutely irrelevant to java stack (of course, there are some little nuances when you do something like develop an eclipse plugin, but in your case where you list several general technologies, there should be zero dependency on an editor) - whether you use netbeans, eclipse, vim, vscode or intellij should change exactly nothing about your project setup, maybe except for extra .gitignore line or two for the editor specific files.

I suspect that majority of the problems you're describing stems from this misconception.

If you want an example of a project using all the latest technologies together, a good place to look is jhipster. It’s code generation of a spring boot and angular or (coming soon) react app. When you use it, it will ask a series of questions about what you want your app to look like, and then generate that app. It as if you paid some expert to come in for a week and set everything up, including migrations, auth, documentation using swagger, and so on.

Excellent! Thank you!

And, to be fair, I've also since discovered https://start.spring.io.

It's worth pointing out that both of these sites exist specifically to address my frustration in just getting started with a Java web stack, but it's taken me a couple of weeks to discover them.

we somehow missed having a link to start.spring.io from the website front page. We'll get that addressed, thanks for this comment.

Why exactly did you choose Netbeans and Gradle, and why didn't you use Spring Boot for your first setup?

And how exactly did you search for examples, considering that there are pretty good guides and lots of examples right on the Github? Here's the one from Spring: https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-jpa/

How do I generate a stubbed structure to start with Spring Boot, without downloading an example? Is there a generator of some kind? I'm still looking for this answer.

That example is for JPA. I thought the "better" answer for a Java ORM was still Hibernate, and I can't find a Spring-based example for that. If you tell me that Hibernate has been usurped by JPA in Java developer mindshare, or if you tell me that JPA just works better with Spring, I can change course. I have no experience with either to make the call.

JPA is just the API; Hibernate implements JPA. :)

Thank you. These are exactly the sorts of comments I need to establish CONTEXT for all of these pieces.

https://start.spring.io/

Here you can generate a project and you can select what options you want in your starter.

I can sympathize with your rant. I remember the first time I started using the spring framework! It’s not bad once you get used to it, though. There are whole swarms of Java programmers who are really Spring programmers because that’s the only way they know how to do anything.

Anyways, I would highly recommend using IntelliJ and Dropwizard, both of which “just work”. Don’t worry about anything else, just use the DW docs.

Just mentioning your IDE as an essential part of the "stack" shows how little core understanding you have. You should read up on the documentation of the basics of java, gradle and spring first. Not sure maybe rails developers expect everything to be spoon fed to them in pieces of 5 minute screencasts or something?

> Just mentioning your IDE as an essential part of the "stack" shows how little core understanding you have

The GP seemed to be indicating they were trying to put together a standard set of tools for others in their company to use. Having one official 'blessed' IDE and a 'standard' way to do things - even as a demonstration process - isn't out of the ordinary. And... given how much any complex Java program relies on the author having an IDE handle things for them (the assumption is that an IDE will help find the correct imports when developing, for example), it's pretty common for people to assume you're using one of the few common ones out there. I guess the author was looking for 'free' up front, but I'm curious why they didn't mention IntelliJ - it's the only thing I'd bother with for 'real' Java development in 2018 (although I'm keeping an eye on the vscode landscape).

> should read up on the documentation of the basics of java, gradle and spring first

There's no 'basics' to those - they are sprawling ecosystems, and any non-trivial task requires a pretty deep understanding of how those pieces fit together.

> maybe rails developers expect everything to be spoon fed to them in pieces of 5 minute screencasts or something?

Perhaps other tech stacks are able to deliver useful/functioning tutorials of information in 5 minute screencasts, without requiring someone to be an expert or have years of the 'tribal knowledge' the GP spoke of in another post?

> The GP seemed to be indicating they were trying to put together a standard set of tools for others in their company to use.

Yup. This is forging a new trail at the company, which is, itself, a painful process.

Ahh - you did mention intellij. :)

I was a grails advocate for a long time. I put up with some of the initial pain (from 0.6 days) because it provided more benefit than not. And, had I not picked up intellij, I may have left the fold a long time ago. :)

As time has gone on, the coupling with Spring has become more obvious - I may have just been blissfully unaware earlier on. The migration to a 'spring boot' based approach has sort of soured me more than I expected. If I wanted to use Spring boot, I'd use it. I preferred some of the Grails conventions, but many have been thrown out or reduced to accommodate the Boot way. Some of the stuff I'd hoped to have to dig in to (and, in some cases, had not needed to be an expert in) have now become requirements to dig in to, and I spend more time configuring and digging through framework problems than the actual application.

No doubt much of this is me, but I'd hoped Grails would improve, but for me, it's just changed. My work with Java/Spring/etc definitely has helped me think about problems differently, and improved my thinking and coding overall, but much of what I was looking for has improved in other ecosystems over the last several years to make continuing in the Java world a harder decision. (context: I'm primarily a solo developer, not working with large teams or large budgets). One minor example: being able to make a code change in a test, run that one test, make another change, and rerun the test, all in a few seconds doesn't seem to be something that's possible in the Spring world, and perhaps not in the Java world in general (no doubt there will be people who tell me "you're doing it wrong" and "we run 4000 spring tests every 7 seconds with 0% CPU!" but it's not been my experience).

> One minor example: being able to make a code change in a test, run that one test, make another change, and rerun the test, all in a few seconds doesn't seem to be something that's possible in the Spring world, and perhaps not in the Java world in general

This was my experience when I began.

What I learned was: unit tests don't need Spring. It seems silly in retrospect, but that's the basic rule. If you need Spring in your unit tests, you probably made a mistake somewhere.

Having worked in a few languages and frameworks, having seen codebases at various levels of maturity and whatnot, I quite like Spring Boot & co. Especially when Kotlin is in the picture.

> shows how little core understanding you have

Really? You dismiss my clearly-not-ignorant comments by belittling me? OK. I should have known.

Part of the frustration here is this: given a clean sheet of paper, and a desire to write a Java-based web application, where do I start? What files do I download? I don't know! How do I start developing with Spring? The site says "add this line to your build file." WTF does that even mean, to a Java noob? What's the file I'm supposed to be putting that configuration into? Unless you have a file structure bootstrapped, and know that they're talking about pom.xml, in the case of Maven, or build.gradle, in the case of Gradle, it doesn't mean anything!

How did I figure that out? By using an IDE and generating example file structures for a "web application" based on those 2 options in the stack. So getting started with Spring requires an existing bootstrapped structure that I STILL don't know how to generate by hand. (Feel free to enlighten me. How do YOU start a new Spring project?) Hence, my frustration with the various IDE's, and their multiple ways of generating what should be a pretty standard stack of files to get started.

As I tried to indicate, I "get it" that I have a lot of this stuff internalized with respect to Rails, and that's what I'm trying to get across. I don't think that the Spring folks understand what they need to do to "onboard" someone to their system. At least Grails seems to do a better job with this.

re: tribal knowledge, what I've found in the Rails world is that much of the "getting started" process stuff was forged around one tech stack early on, and often one editor that everyone used (based on having watched a video).

When Spring started, there was already a myriad ways of doing stuff, and multiple IDEs, and multiple use cases for Java itself, and Spring was trying to answer a lot more up front.

If you're doing 'web' in Java (something I still think much of the java world still doesn't really 'get'), there are dozens of choices/options/etc. If, in 2006, you were planning to do 'web' and wanted to use Ruby... the primary choice was Rails. If you were doing 'web' and wanted to use Python... you similarly have often only had one or two major choices (I'd argue 'Zope' early on, then Django as a default go-to for the last 10 years or so). In the Java world... way too many choices up front, all answering similar problems, but slightly differently.

While Ruby was out before Rails, their popularity generally rose in tandem, and much of the tooling for the ecosystem seemed to develop in tandem during the progression of Rails itself.

Had Spring started in 1997, we might have seen a somewhat different trajectory re: choice/tooling/community/etc.

You might not like it, but I think that you need to start from scratch. Learn Java language, learn how javac compiler could be called, compile simple application from console. Then learn about Maven or Gradle, how to use them to build things. Then learn a bit about IDE. I suggest Idea, but Eclipse or NetBeans should work fine. Learn about Java Servlets, it's the underlying library for almost every Java web application. Deploy simple servlet to tomcat, learn how to handle GET/POST requests. Learn about JDBC, combine servlets and JDBC. Actually here you can stop and write production code for some simple REST service, for example. Only after you have some understanding about every underlying part, you should start with Spring framework, JPA, etc. And still it'll take a lot of time to learn those things.

I'd suggest not to search for various "stacks". They might be written poorly and incomplete. Learn each part and learn how to combine them.

I guess Rails is a complete solution, with Java there are many libraries which you should choose and glue together. Every non-trivial application probably will use somewhat unique combination of libraries.

> What is the "right" framework stack to use to create a Java web application TODAY? And by "right," I mean "most popular," in order to make finding answers as easy as possible.

I understand that motivation, but given that someone else (company) has made some of this decision for you, based on - it seems - ability of other people in the company to take over the apps, is there not some internal standard or existing apps you can learn from?

I realize telling you how this is a stupid decision your company has made doesn't really help, but given the decision, I'd think that would mean there's someone else with existing Java web app knowledge/experience for you to learn from?

Having the app done in Java - even if it means it's 6 months late - seems to be more important than having the app(s) available now, which - that alone must be frustrating. :/

If there's someone else to glean from, they're in one of the myriad consulting companies that we've hired to write existing Java apps, and then bugger off, never to update them again.

Frustrating doesn't even scratch the surface of what this is. And, to be fair, my attitude about how this has gone hasn't exactly helped me find the answers I need. ;-)

> My current direction, which I was all set to get serious with today, was to use Groovy on Grails

Is that version 2 or 3 of Grails? Virtually no-one has updated their Grails 2 websites to version 3, or is starting new projects in Grails 3. Choosing version 3 means first adopter risk.

So I'm quickly discovering. The problem is that I know the kinds of changes Rails introduces from one major revision to the next. If Grails follows that pattern, I don't really want to get started with 2.x, knowing that I'll have to relearn a lot of things on 3.x. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

> Choosing version 3 means first adopter risk.

I upgraded a couple v2 to v3, mostly because of concern about security (moderately sensitive data, most of the 2-era plugins aren't updated, etc). The allure of v3 was supposed to be "it's all spring boot!" but... I'm not capable enough of just installing random spring stuff and configuring it for boot - there's still 'stuff' grails does its own way (or... it's just my competency level?) But if I need to become much more proficient in spring boot to get benefit from grails 3... i'll just move to spring boot in the long haul. This seemed an inevitable move for grails, but not one I was excited about.

Go to https://start.spring.io. It will let you down laod zip file which contains base project structure. Choose maven or gradle. Don't create your project using any ide netbeans, eclipse, Inyelij IDEA. USe file -> open menu and open maven(pom.xml) or gradle(build.gradle) file and choose as project.

Yes i do prefer maintainability and same codebase over one tool which one specific developer is very good in and is the only one using it.

On another note: Just don't use Spring 5 or every other framework for a small simple thing which got just released.

There is no harm at all in using Spring 4 and all tools and everything is just working.

> For a couple of weeks, I've been trying to bootstrap an environment to read an existing database

Correct me if I'm wrong: for several WEEKS you're struggling with implementing a database read?