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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

The JVM is vastly underestimated. I think the root cause is an image problem, stemming from a combination of bad programming practices in the past (getter/setter bloat, Factories for everything and unnecessary object orientation) and heavy and outdated frameworks such as Spring, JSF and others.

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For me, one reason I avoid Java is because it’s what I used in college when I was a much less proficient programmer. I remember it being confusing and a lot of hard work. That association probably has more to do with learning programming than it has to do with Java but it has stuck, in my mind, somewhat.

Give Kotlin a go. Fresh perspective on the JVM goes a long way to dispelling that feeling.

How is Spring outdated? Spring Boot seems to be a good option.

I wouldn't say Spring entirely is outdated. Hibernate and EntityManager are--they were made for the time of Enterprise JavaBeans and their lifecycle.

And what is the alternative in the JVM environment? But I have to say, I'd like something less verbose. Springs stack trace looks ridiculously bloated. Still, other than that, you hardly notice the framework once everything is setup.

These days I’d go with a JAX Rest backend. The frontend is pure HTML+JS (so no server side templates unless they make sense). No dependency injection but „hand-wired“ dependencies at the top level. I also don’t use ORMs anymore. This means a slower start in the beginning, but later in the project you’re not caught up in a net of a dozen intertwined frameworks.

Lightbend offers a couple good options. Play for web applications: https://www.playframework.com/

Lagom for microservices (which is based on Play): https://www.lagomframework.com/

I highly recommend Play as well.

I'd recommend looking at Quarkus for new JVM-based microservices, especially Kubernetes-based ones.

https://quarkus.io/

Cool, I'll check Quarkus out.

There are many alternatives to Spring if you prefer a more DIY approach. Namely Javalin, Micronaut, KTor (for Kotlin folk) and many more (Quarkus was already mentioned).

Spring however is the way to go if you come from a Rails/Django/ASP.NET background and want the framework that everything works with out of the box.

I agree and I doubt anyone starts new projects with JSF anymore. But it’s still very much on my mind when I think about Java web apps. As I said, it’s an image problem, not a technical one. the comment I replied to laid down why the JVM is more viable than ever and I hypothesized why people don’t go for it yet.

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