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Comment by nerd_in_rage | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I saw this same thing. Mountains of XML deployment descriptors / "component wiring" (some "Spring" garbage), needlessly verbose and usually unneeded mapper classes, useless interfaces (my rule is if you are only going to have ONE implementation save the interface for later after you know you got it right and need it), extra layers that do nothing (except "map", of course), etc.

kill me. Makes me want to kill myself.

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This exactly describes my very brief experience working with Java professionally. Back in university it was no big deal - the differences between C++ and Java weren't that big. In a production environment, though; ... XML, XML, XML!

All the XML-wrapper tools for Java are supposedly the reason why there is so much XML config stuff going on - but the result is that you end up writing soo much code in XML instead of the actual language that you're supposed to be using.

It's like somebody looked quickly at the MVC pattern, got it all wrong, and now Java has very tight coupling between XML and Java code for any production environment that hopes to leverage existing tools.

And the really bad part is that in Java XML has always been extremely painful to work with.

That's one of the reasons I left my first and last employer. Tons of compnontent wiring written in xml, tons of configuration directives, but the end only the defaults were used anyway. Impossible to do updates because everything could break.

Spring offers some if the features to JAVA, that these newer languages have. Spring annotations lessens the XML configuration, none at times, it's AOP jar allows passing methods to methods as in some of the functional types, etc. Problem is people haven't updated their codebase and continue maintaining the old XMLs.

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