Ask HN: Do you find the Java enterprise ecosystem complex? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you find the Java enterprise ecosystem complex?

I find the entire edifice of Java Spring Boot all the way down to gradle extraordinarily complex. Does it really have to be this complex? What's the simplest API framework out there that doesn't require one to read multiple books to put together a simple internal app.

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Java EE and Spring Boot are two different things, so I'm a little confused about what you're getting at. Historically Java EE (eg, Enterprise Java Beans and all of their accoutrements) was considered very complex, and Spring was the "simpler, easier" alternative.

There's no question that as the scope of Spring grew things got somewhat more complex, but honestly, I still find Spring Boot and Spring based Java web apps fairly simple. You write Controllers and use a few annotations to define the context path, urls to individual endpoints, inputs/outputs of the various endpoints, etc. All those things have to be defined somewhere no matter what platform you use, no?

The only part I find maybe just a touch annoying is the Spring Data JPA stuff. It's not conceptually difficult, and truth be told the CrudRepository stuff makes it dead simple to make basic repository instances. But the configuration is just fiddly/tedious enough to be ever so slightly off-putting. But even on that, you can create a project once with all of that setup, save it off to the side as a template, and just copy that anytime you need it in the future (this is, in fact, exactly what I do).

I dunno... all in all, Spring Boot seems mostly fine to me. Grails is arguably a little bit simpler but that's still just Spring Boot with some syntactic sugar layered on top to handle the common cases.

(Sorry, I meant to say enterprise, but wrote EE by mistake).

It was frustrating to see the weight of the whole edifice.

Running gradlew on the sample one-controller Spring boot tutorial app took 12 minutes to download and compile. The stack trace shows 50 function calls(!) all the way down to Thread.run. The startup of this simple app takes 3 seconds on my mac.

The equivalent code in golang frameworks seems so much more direct.

Sure, it's going to take a while the first time, because your gradle cache hasn't be populated yet. You should find subsequent builds to be much, much faster. If not, something is wrong with your setup.

Startup time? I personally don't care about startup time for a long-running server process; at least not if we're just talking a few seconds. The JVM is better at optimizing long-running processes than things that are starting and stopping frequently (although to be fair, JVM cold startup time has improved dramatically in later JVM releases).

Anyway... if you'd rather write Go, then write Go. Presumably nobody has a gun to your head making you work with Spring / Java. shrug

Thanks for your response. Alas, Go is not an option for me ... I only have access to Java programmers. They know Spring Boot better than I do, but their systems reek of complexity, and I suspect that is because there is a huge weight of enterprise practices that they feel they should conform to.

For example, in a latency critical path, I identified 4 microservices in a chain; it seemed to me that all one needs in that situation -- they all have similar scaling needs -- is a simple modular structure where one module enqueues an in-memory request for the next task in the chain. No json, no network etc.

Their response? "Monolith bad, microservice good". If you want microservice, spring boot it is. And they must be packaged with docker, and managed by a cluster manager.

I blame the complexity of these enterprise models because they lead these engineers to believe that simple solutions are not possible.

Fair enough.

There are several minimalistic frameworks out there for building microservices in Java:

    - SparkJava
    - Javalin
    - Ninja Framework
    - Dropwizard
    - Rapidoid

Other frameworks that are less "minimalistic" but cover a much wider range of use cases and come with several built-in integrations are:

    - Quarkus
    - Micronaut
    - Spring Boot

And these are frameworks for building the core bits of your back-end systems. For front-end, if you are into component-based web frameworks, I highly suggest:

    - Apache Wicket
    - Vaadin

If you are not into component-based, then:

    - Thymeleaf
    - Qute

Now, you may conclude "boy, this only proves my point that the Java ecosystem is "extraordinarily complex". But you can also read this as "extraordinarily successful", given that most of these frameworks are 5 to 10+ years old, very stable, mature, and still kicking with great community support.

Thank you for your response. No, my comment was not on the entire Java ecosystem, only on the "enterprise" mindset. The Java ecosystem is rich, and I like it.

As a consultant I am constantly running into enterprise engineers who are "spring specialists" ... they don't think in terms of simplicity and the entire system. They want a little bit of workflow, and instead of using a messaging product (or simpler still, a shared filesystem) they want to use a workflow product which comes with its own fat manual and is all things to all people. I'm aghast that a simple app takes up gigabytes of RAM, and even more so that they are so blasé about it. </rant>

To answer my own question, I like the look of jooby a lot. I will go through your list of micro frameworks as well. Thanks again.

Try Node, if you're into JS, gets you off pretty fast.

When i first started learning Java EE (actual EE, not Spring), it did feel overwhelming. It is objectively complex. The learning curve is steep and intimidating, but so is anything else when you first start with it. What i later found out was that anxiety was all due to not knowing how the different parts tie together. In time, i got an idea of the purpose of the different APIs and how they are supposed to work together. This means that i didn't have to learn in details all aspects of the framework. You delve deep just in the part you need.

And i just read the docs (official ones, not 3rd party books), skim through sections to get a feel for it. In time, it will all start making sense to you. When you get to actual work, you'll know where to dig in for the details. This worked out great for me when i started on Spring projects as well. And at the end, i found that that the most difficult part was to overcome the anxiety of it all...

Will this approach work for you? Don't know, it's not a math formula.

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