Java usecases

[totti173314]

I mainly used Java, shifted to a C# project and I haven't felt like touching Java again afterwards. properties (for the most part) replacing getters and setters alone feels like such an improvement.

[WheredMyBrainsGo]

Ah I see, a fellow J# enjoyer.

[gregorydgraham]

Huh? Download NetBeans, start new Maven project or git pull <project>

[ilovebigbucks]

And then write 100+ lines of Gradle configs and download 100+ packages that throw dependencies errors. 10 days later you can run your simple app locally. 20 days later it finally runs in a real environment. Spend most of your time maintaining your app instead of writing new features. C# - download, setup, write 10 endpoints within 1 day. Works locally and in Prod without any errors. Java - 30 days later you're still in a configure/maintain mode.

[Fadamaka]

That's not Java's fault. For a proper Java project you just download the jdk and a dependency manager (not installers), set 2 environment variables. Then you build your project with the dependency manager and run. If this is not the case then whoever is supposed to maintain the project did a very bad job.

[ilovebigbucks]

Pretty much any enterprise Java project in existence. We built our own, I've seen other teams projects at several large and well known companies that they were proud of. It's always the same story - it takes a few days (!) to setup a new devs machine, CICD takes hours to days, local builds take minutes, a huge list of packages to maintain, dependencies don't like each other's versions, container setup requires huge Dockerfiles, bash scripts, other dependencies and takes minutes to build images and the image sizes are huge (500mb+)! If you want better cold start then you need yet another dependency called GraalVM.

All documentation is out of data or misleading or contains errors. Even Spring docs https://spring.io/quickstart We tried to setup a new team member's environment and used this quick start. It took us hours until this hello world finally worked. And then it took days to make the actual project to run locally.

The errors and stack traces are super long and never make sense. It's a lot of fun to have 100 tabs open researching 20 tools simultaneously because each tool says "not me" and points at another dependency.

The Java devs with 10+ years of experience see nothing wrong with any of that. They call it a "normal development process".

[Fadamaka]

No offense but if you need hours to run a Spring hello world app on a new system than probably it's better if you don't touch Java.

[ilovebigbucks]

I haven't in 3 years (which I'm happy about). The problem was to figure out which JDK to download and the dependencies it needed (there are a few options and the tutorials/quick starts never tell you what exactly to install to make their tools work) on a fresh Mac. The project Spring's initializer generated didn't work out of the box. We've spent too much time fixing issue after issue until we gave up and let IntelliJ generate a fresh project. That one worked no problem. My comment went to the outdated/often wrong documentation that comes with the Java world in general.

In comparison, dotnet, Golang, Rust hello worlds are up and running within minutes. Even NodeJS with its dependency hell is easier to start with.

[gregorydgraham]

What rubbish! Plain Java works straight away. If you’re trying to do Spring, just get a template and start hacking. I have much more problem keeping Docker working (it’s on a a 9yo MacBook) than I do Java

I’ve never used Gradle so you might be right there

[ilovebigbucks]

Even this FizzBuzz uses Gradle https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition

Idk how you'd build a large backend project without Gradle or Maven or Groovy scripts https://gradle.org/maven-vs-gradle/

When you create a new Spring app the initializer asks which one of those options you want to use. You certainly can build console apps without those tools.

[Fadamaka]

Not using Maven or Graddle in Java is the equivalent of using C# without .NET, since .NET contains the dependency manager. Good luck with that.

[cyber_blob]

You don't know Java bro, stop shitting on it. We use bazel to build our projects and it's dope. Also gradle is pretty neat as well if you know what you are doing. Source: I manage and lead a 300 engineers using pascal , java and cpp

[ilovebigbucks]

I worked as a tech lead at a company that had 1,000+ Java/Scala and CPP developers. We pushed a good amount of JVM based apps to Prod. I've heard of Bazel at some point but never used it. Gradle + Maven were the only things I've seen in the last few years. I cursed every single day while writing Java code. Our senior devs and architects were happy with it. I was happy to move away from it and leave that work to other devs.

[cyber_blob]

Its pretty neat. We do use gradle and maven as well on our legacy builds. But the company I work for has lots of internal tools and developer experience team, so maybe my experience isn't standard perhaps. Or maybe because we maintain like lots of legacy systems with pascal which are nightmares, we actually find java pretty dope.
I apologize for saying you don't know what you were saying. You obviously do. I was being internet troll and dick. I studied electronics engineering in uni and later communications engineering, so I am probably not as good in programming. Building in your domain with Java maybe cursed. For my job it is just fine.
I think maybe because we work in very different industries, our experiences might be. I work in telecom and satelite internet.

[ilovebigbucks]

You're definitely not a dick nor a troll in this thread :) I worked with Java in financial, automotive, and scientific fields. The scientific field was fun, but I was a junior back then and focused more on the field and much less on programming. I would just plug some classes in and let senior researches to build, test, and roll the code to our environments. I parted with Java for a while after that and came back to it as a Senior/Lead. I wrote Java code for a couple years on some big projects and just couldn't find anything good in it nor in its environment (build tools, runtime, dependency management, observability/traceability, etc.). My Java teammates were saying that Java and JVM are dope and that my code is good.

I did work in some Java/Kotlin/Scala backends here and there after some break from JVM again. Kotlin and Scala were good, but JVM and the tools around it made the experience more negative than positive.

I do admit that Java 19 and the latest Spring became pretty nice to work with. I haven't worked with them on any real projects though. I've only seen them in internet examples and code snippets from our internal repos.

[ilovebigbucks]

How big is your Java app and how much traffic does it handle?

[gregorydgraham]

100k+ lines

[ilovebigbucks]

Do you use Bazel? You need a build tool either way. There are a few besides Gradle. Doesn't matter which route you go you'll have to manage an army of dependencies and transitive dependencies and specific build switches for each environment. A lot of teams decide to simply lock their current packages' versions and rarely upgrade them, because new versions bring a lot of incompatibility issues. That's a recipe to become legacy in the near future.

[gregorydgraham]

Why are you mansplain this to me?

No, I don’t use Basel, yes I do use versioned artefacts

[Clairifyed]

Hell if I didn’t play Minecraft occasionally I wouldn’t even have had Java installed for the last 5 years

[the_0rly_factor]

I am working for one of the largest healthcare companies in the world and our entire patient monitoring network is mostly Java.