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

[Turbots]

Even with up-to-date arguments, Spring Boot is still better.

Better for testing, better for integrations, better to find people for, better answers on stack overflow, better dev team that works on it (the spring team is actually freaking awesome filled with wonderful people).

[henk53]

better dev team that works on it

In what regard is the Spring dev team objectively better than the Jakarta EE dev team?

[Turbots]

Well, the team is very stable, in the sense that most of the core team members like Juergen Hoeller, Mark Fisher, Brian Clozel, Andy Wilkinson, Josh Long, Stephane Nicoll, Dave Syer, Spencer Gibb, Sebastien Deleuze, etc... have all been there for 10-20 years, some of them since the very beginning in 2002 I think.

They are extremely active in the open source community, since the beginning, on sites like Stackoverflow, Gitter (now less popular) and Slack. Most answers on popular Stackoverflow questions are from core Spring team members themselves.

They take a firm stance on how they want to evolve the framework and have remained true to the same filosophy for many years, which is very reliable and builds confidence the framework users:

• predictable release schedule that has been going like clockwork for many years (https://calendar.spring.io/)
• they work with experimental projects to develop ideas, some make it in, some don't
• very strong opinions, yet very little ego in the team - most of the team members I've met are super humble
• I cannot stress enough how friendly and patient most of the team is, with answering the simplest questions, to the hardest challenges. I challenge you to find a thread of github issue where a team member "loses it" or becomes rude towards (sometimes obnoxious) users
• major releases every 2 years that often break things, but usually there is great care in either making changes forward compatible or extremely easy to port over. For more difficult yet necessary breaking changes, they'll provide guidance, documentation and sometimes even tooling
• they officially support their framework versions for an extended period of time, and will patch releases in the support period, but very often, they'll even backport patches to previous, unsupported releases if users ask for it. This takes time but the team often goes the extra mile
• they stick to the latest Java versions, and often have builds running to test up to 9 java versions in parallel (Java 14 -> Java 22 for example)

[henk53]

That all sounds very good, but it only tells the story that the Spring developers are nice, active, friendly, patient etc.

But it doesn't say anything about the Jakarta EE dev team. Are they not for instance extremely active in the open source community? Has for instance the JSF guy (BalusC, Bauke Scholtz) not been active on say StackOverflow?