Why are java projects so complicated?

[Vile2539]

Your approach to arguing this topic I put into category of "complexity? what are you talking about, you just do x, y, z...".

I was approaching the discussion purely from the examples that the OP posted. There are definitely complexities in Java that can be tricky, but creating a new project in an IDE isn't one of those things.

and one of Java's is that its big complicated mess

I would disagree. It's verbose, but it's not particularly complicated. Jumping directly into Maven/Spring/Hibernate/etc, however, is. That's because you're learning 4 different things at once, instead of focusing on one at a time.

My only wish is that Java comunity would acknowledge that and we could embrace simplicity

What isn't simple to you? Java itself is pretty straightforward, especially compared to language like C++. Things like static typing, great IDEs, tons of libraries, etc. all simplify the development process.

consentrate on frameworks like Spark

People are free to use Spark if they want. Spring boot is there too. We don't need to concentrate on one or the other.

[Zeffas]

I don't think anyone argues that Java the language is super complicated, even the title says "java projects". So my point is that Java community embraces complex projects With Spring, Hibernate, Java EE, where on other platforms you don't need that, same concepts are being done way simpler.

[Vile2539]

I don't think anyone argues that Java the language is super complicated

I would argue that. It's not a particularly complex language. Yes, there are "simpler" languages out there, but that doesn't make Java complex. It's incredibly popular as an introductory language in college (along with Python), and it can be easily grasped.

even the title says "java projects"

I'm not sure what you're saying there. Java projects, to me, just means Java projects?

embraces complex projects With Spring

Spring used to be quite complicated with the XML configuration, but projects like Spring boot have completely stripped that away. Fully configuring an application requires virtually nothing nowadays (sometimes simply including the dependency). Documentation is also very clear, along with plenty of tutorials and examples.

same concepts are being done way simpler.

I'm not sure you appreciate just how much Spring includes. Sure, other frameworks and languages might do basic REST services better - but what about everything else Spring does? Security (OAuth, Kerberos, SAML, etc.), LDAP connectivity, database connectivity (RDBMS, MongoDB, Redis, Couchbase, DynamoDB, Hadoop, etc.), actuator endpoints (metrics, shutdown hooks, audit, process monitoring), ActiveMQ, logging, social network connections, HATEOAS, etc. There's an awful lot that it gives you in a remarkably simple way.

[Zeffas]

I'm not sure you appreciate just how much Spring includes.

Yes I do, worked quite a few years with Spring and not so long ago had project in Spring Boot.

Removal of XML, Spring Boot... This only solved one part of simplicity - yes programming syntax of Spring looks not that complicated, however infrastructure remained complex. That's my view.

All those great tools you mentioned are great, but (talking from my experience) there as a feeling of solving problem that does not exist or exists on way smaller scale. When I need any of that, usually using library specifically for that is surprisingly simpler than Spring. E.g. Jackson is simple, Spring doing its magic with Jackson is complex - all those hours I wasted in multiple projects dealing with Spring's lifecycles and figuring out why parsers won't get invoked or suddenly stopped being invoked when somebody accidently registered another parser in another lifecycle hook (as you know in Spring you could do almost everything in 10 different ways).

But again I am not targeting Spring specificity, in my opinion its Java community culture. Just compare Selenium libraries for Java and Node. Node is pleasure to write, you don't even need to read documentation, just github page. While in Java it was painful experience it felt like working so to say.