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Comment by artwr | Hacker News Reader

Asking to learn, but if you were to start a Java application in the following two scenarios: 1) Monolith with some CRUD, API, persistence to a DB + search. 2) Scalable backend with an API, persistence to a DB + some caching

what would you use these days?

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Not in any particular order (choose what fits your team): Kotlin or Java and a lighter framework (e.g. Javalin is to Spring as Sinatra is to Rails, with JDBI), a newer big framework (e.g. Micronaut, maybe Play, others), Phoenix/Elixir, Rails/Ruby+Sorbet, Go with libraries.

Edit: I just did a google search for "Java Framework" and get a lot of useless top-N lists with old content retitled "in 2020" with hits like: Hibernate (not a framework), JSF (JavaServer Faces), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Struts (The Later Version), DropWizard (seems to have stagnated and docs are all over the place. JDBI was extracted and has a life of its own).

Cmon, you can't be serious, do you really recommend Play, Micronaut, etc. over Spring ecosystem? Also if you want the benefits of GraalVM you can stay in the ecosystem today with Spring Native, moreover if you are ideologically against Spring then you should go with Quarkus because that's the next technology by maturity/popularity. How can you not go with Spring when REST services are today a solved problem? Why do you want to turn it into a problem by adopting something else that is not battle tested? In the company that I work for, Spring is ruling the microservices layer and we have a combination of Scala and Python for data pipelines that are not related to the behavior of the business logic, they only know one thing and that is data. Hibernate has not been a problem for us, I can say that I totally recommend it when you have multiple people working on a project, rather than polluting the codebase with raw SQL.

If you really want something exotic in Scala that is impossible to express in Java, Go, Ruby, Elixir etc., then take a look at the Typelevel (cats, cats-effect, http4s, doobie) ecosystem or ZIO. If purely functional programming is your cup of tea.

I'm not ideologically against Spring since I mentioned Micronaut being a modern take on it, without the outdated assumptions. I'm not familiar with Quarkus but someone else recommended it so may have a look at it. I'm currently at a Rails shop, but I see patterns evolving as teams get larger toward program construction patterns like Spring, persistence, repository, application model, etc. ActiveRecord as big as it is, is still much simpler than Spring/Hibernate with an EntityManager.

BTW, I did work at a startup for years building microservices with Spring which is where I ran into it's limitations. I basically worked around the EntityManager, JPQL, and query template caching where ever it was necessary, which was frequent. I'm not against query builders or data mappers, having worked on making one myself[0]. I'm just more performance/resource conscious than most.

[0] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql

Anything Java-backend-ish these days, my first 2 stops would be Quarkus [1] or Micronaut [2]. It would need special requirements that those couldn't match to move me to something else.

[1] - https://quarkus.io/ [2] - https://micronaut.io/

HTTP: javalin

persistence: jooq + postgres

search: postgres full text search

cache: ehcache

A new Java application? Java is getting pretty long in the tooth. You might be better off building on top of Go or Rust, especially for those specific scenarios (Go in particular was designed to build network services.)

"Lol!", Thats what you would get in response when you tell that to the major enterprise customers.

When I did enterprise sales, we had another phrase for that: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." (Coincidentally, I also worked for IBM, back in the day.)

While it's true that tech choices are signals that enterprises do use to determine quality, if you are relying on a particular choice of programming language to sell into major enterprises that's simply a mistake. (And enterprises have invested vast sums in technology written in c# or PHP, so clearly it's not all "lol" out there.)

Rust's and Go's capabilities of compiling into a single binary, without requiring a JVM that needs to be fed and cared for, make them a particularly compelling choice for enterprise deployments. Kubernetes itself is written in Go.

Linux itself is written in C, though everything runs on it. Who cares about the language that Kubernetes is written in (by the way, it used to be Java but it was changed politically to Go)? If you are writing Java/Scala you can use GraalVM to achieve the same thing that Go does. If your service is mainly doing data processing, then Go won't help you there because its abstractions are too low-level or even non-existent. A Java service/app won't require a JVM if you you create a self-contained application package. Applications can be deployed on fresh systems with no requirement for the JRE to be installed. The advantage is that you control the version of the JRE used by the application and the disadvantage is that application updates are the responsibility of developer and self-contained applications do not have built-in support for automatic updates. Exactly why for services I wouldn't recommend it, and neither Go or Rust. I would never trade the state-of-the-art garbage collectors that the JVM provides me with the ones of Go or the borrow checker of Rust (though I would take Rust anytime over Go). I can't help myself but only think that you comment is straight from the 90s when it comes to the JVM ecosystem.

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