Why I Like Spring II
Okay, so in my previous article, I stated some of the things that I like about Spring, although, it doesn’t stop there, Spring is just beautiful for MSA and/or distributed applications. Not to mention how popular Spring is, Spring may just be the most popular Java framework at this moment in time, having used more traditional styled Java EE frameworks & application architecture, it’s simple to see why many developers decide to make use of Java Spring.
The fact that Spring Boot comes with an embedded server just further simplifies the process of setting up your Spring application. Again, having come from a more traditional Java EE background, applications used to have to utilise specific technologies based on the application server of choice, i.e. using certain libraries and/or frameworks in TomCat wouldn’t be a walk in the park, compared to say JBoss EAP or WildFly, etc.
Then there’s the configuration side of things, in older Java solutions, there was XML everywhere, but with Spring, you have the option to use XML or Java for your configuration, thankfully we’re no longer tied to a specific approach. If you compare Spring to something along the lines of the Play framework, while th Play framework does have it’s own strengths, it’s not quite as well supported or as well documented as the Spring framework. Not to mention how the Play framework requires some OS environment configuration, etc.
Conclusion
Spring is just great, it’s tried & tested, not to mention how it has a minimal and/or limited amount of risk involved compared to alternative Java frameworks. The Spring ecosystem is also very modulare, so you don’t need the entire ecosystem for every project that uses Spring to some extent or another. But above all else, Spring seriously reduces any form of complexity that’s involved with developing a distributed enterprise scale Java application.
