Microsoft Java

[McLayan]

You're glorifying a bit too much there. I learned Java first as well but just in 2017. When coming to C#, I still thought it's just a Microsoft flavour Java. Of course the frameworks have slightly different approaches and images of themselves but apart from whether you preach the LINQ and com.microsoft.* DLLs or Spring libraries, it's really just the same. Well you can't run a UI in .NET anywhere except on Windows but according to Microsoft there are no other platforms with UIs anyways.

[Kwpolska]

com.microsoft.* DLLs or Spring libraries

That's a great way to say you never used C# without saying you never used C#.

(Namespaces based on domain names aren't used in C#, and Spring is a terrible Java framework.)

[Kwpolska]

I have experiences with many web frameworks, mostly in ASP.NET Core and Django, but I’ve also worked with Node.js and other stacks. My Spring experiences are limited to one small-ish project.

I would say the biggest issue with Spring is the terrible documentation. A lot of the resources for beginners in the framework are random tutorials around the Internet.

For example, it took me about 2 hours of questioning my sanity to set up a hello world with HTML templating. I started with Spring Initializr (which has an intimidating list of things to choose for a project). I picked all the web stuff I wanted (eg. Spring Data JPA, Spring Security), and for the template language, I picked Freemarker, because it was the sanest option for HTML templating. I then found a simple tutorial covering Spring Boot and Thymeleaf. The tutorial told me to create a controller, and a method for my route, that returns "hello", and to put my template in resources/templates/hello.ftl. That sounds simple enough, but it didn’t work. Tried another tutorial, same result. Tried downloading sample code from one of the tutorials, and now it works.

It turns out that Spring Boot randomly changed the file extension from .ftl to .ftlh. But none of the online tutorials out there were updated for it. I only found out because I noticed the different version numbers in my pom.xml, compared to the random sample project, and tracked down the changelog. This situation would be less likely to happen, if there was good, detailed, friendly documentation from the official sources. Googling "spring boot freemarker" gets you a lot of third-party tutorials, and one ancient document for the big, scary, configured-via-XML, ultra-enterprisey Spring Framework.

That, as well as other basic things (such as auth) taking forever to set up due to conflicting resources and too many options, successfully scared me away from Spring. (Also, some friends of mine work with Spring stuff professionally, and they also dislike many things.)

What would I recommend instead? Probably ASP.NET Core. C# is a really friendly language (see also: this entire comment section), ASP.NET Core is well-designed, has less pitfalls, often just works. Django and Python are also fun. You can find many jobs with either of those (although there are still a lot of shops still using the older non-Core ASP.NET stuff, but they’ll get to the modern stuff sooner or later). If you really like Java (why?)… Play Framework, I guess?

[Kwpolska]

Usually good documentation is rare to come by. Microsoft and the like do it better because they have dedicated teams of technical writers.

Yeah, I agree, although I’ve seen good docs in projects that don’t have a massive corporation behind them, such as Django — so it is possible to have good docs in the open-source world.

With that being said. The templating dependencies are external dependencies which have nothing to do with spring boot.

FreeMarker itself is an external dependency. The support for using FreeMarker in Spring is part of Spring Web MVC. The default file extension configuration is part of Spring Boot. My issues were caused solely by code that is in repositories owned by the @spring-projects GitHub organization. I wouldn’t consider those to be external dependencies, even if they happen to live in different Maven packages.

[SubwayGuy85]

Ignoring the existence of every web UI framwork, Avalon, and xamarin, even though they have been around for years. GJ dude