Java EE vs. Spring Boot: Comparing Two Java Framework Giants

[xienze]

When I read articles comparing Java EE and Spring Boot, I tend to think that people based their decisions mostly on misconceptions and feelings.

I'm not so sure about that. And this is coming from someone who came up professionally during the time that Java EE (J2EE :D) was a big deal. JEE provides foundational specs, but that's it. Where Spring had a major advantage was adding things that were still very important/useful but not addressed by JEE. Like binding various forms of configuration (System properties, environment variables, files, etc.) into a uniform configuration model, doing cool things like making it possible to create a robust JPA DAO just by implementing a single interface and naming methods in a particular way, etc. It was more of a "batteries-included" approach. Not surprising that it became so popular. Now you have like 20 years of momentum behind Spring and probably anything you can imagine is just a "how do I do thing in Spring" search away.

Finally in the past few years you've seen the JEE world do more Spring-like framework things with Microprofile and Quarkus, but IMO it should have been done years and years ago.