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Comment by cryptos | Hacker News Reader

I know and like Java for almost 30 years now. It is amazing how carefully the language is beeing refined. For the cultural aspect, yes, that is sadly true, but I have the feeling that the culture changes. More and more developers realize that there is a better way now (e. g. records instead of dumb classes full of getters and setters). Maybe the main problem is bloated frameworks and their stickyness. The Helidon framework, for example, is a breath of fresh air compared to Spring. Go developers complaining about huge Java frameworks and boilplate could be happy with it.

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IMHO, the main reason why Spring is huge is because it has grown organically to encompass many of the business cases/issues that one may encounter in both depth and breadth. So the http framework supports almost everything you may ever need and there is integration with every database, middleware, infra like kubernetes. (One can debate about the quality of all the lesser used modules but the main modules are pretty okay.)

On the other hand I have used Quarkus which was great until it wasn’t because a certain http feature wasn’t supported or we needed integration with an unsupported database. In enterprise that is enough reason to just choose for the batteries included option and lift along on improvements of the main framework.

> or we needed integration with an unsupported database

How difficult is/was it to add a custom integration?

Just adding the bare bones integration wasn’t that hard. The trick comes from ensuring all the observability is wired correctly, that it fits in the framework usage, works good with graalvm, and other “non-functionals”.

At this point the work is typically more than you want a single team to maintain. Unfortunately, in many large enterprises it is just easier and more efficient to grab a bigger framework than trying to organise sharing the custom integration in the organisation.

+1 for Helidon (https://helidon.io/) - such a great framework, especially the SE variant. Powerful, modern, fast, modularised, and easy to understand.

I'm back on Spring for work reasons but use it for all my side-projects.

i am building my own framework on top of it[1]. the biggest thing for me was it was rewritten on virtual threads from grounds up. no vertx. no netty, lesser indirections.

1. https://github.com/sku0x20/stopgap

I was not aware of Helidon. Looks nice at first sight!

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