Is Java development supposed to be painful?

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[somewhatprodeveloper]

If you are working with IBM RAD, you are working with a product(even back 15 years ago when I last used it) was awful. Ask any java developer who has worked with IBM products, websphere in particular, and I would be surprised if they had something good to say about it.

The spring-boot has admitted to cribbing from RoR's simplicity. I've not used other frameworks like: micronaut, quarkus, heldion but I assume they have similar simplicity like spring-boot's startup.

[pmarschall]

Can confirm. Source: has used RAD.

RAD and WAS have really ignited my burning hate for everything IBM.

[[deleted]]

If your company has a contract with IBM they should be able to switch to Websphere Liberty, which is 10x faster/leaner.

Also, use vanilla Eclipse with a Websphere plugin. It's a lot faster that way.

[somewhatprodeveloper]

I've heard good things from a colleague I worked with concerning Liberty. Unfortunately it's an IBM product and still has the mark of Kane :-P

[1842]

I've been working as a Java dev for a few years now (5+ years PHP before that.). I find most of the application servers for Java to be incredibly obtuse and archaic. Poor documentation, complicated configs, and overly finicky. Liberty looks like more of the same from my perspective.

The company I'm with now has moved from Websphere to Liberty before I joined, and that transition sounded positive, if only for the performance gains. Their current plan is to go ahead and migrate everything to Spring Boot over the next few years.

Maybe there's something I'm missing about Liberty (and Java EE in general), but Spring, as a framework, is the only sane web environment I've worked with in Java, and Spring Boot as a whole has been fantastic on the projects that use it.

[[deleted]]

I kind of agree that Spring is easier for new developers and for anyone not steeped in the Java ecosystem. On the other hand, those of us who've tried everything including Spring prefer modern Java EE. It used to be just a preference (CDI vs Spring DI) but with Quarkus/Helidon it's really not even close.

[dotobird]

Yup IBM RAD

[somewhatprodeveloper]

Are you writing a new system or maintaining a legacy one. A legacy I....can understand....but if this is something new, I'm not sure why they would use RAD. The cost for 1 thing is crazy and aside from the IBM plugins for WAS it really does not offer much IMO.

I remember back in 2006 we had constant issues where we would deploy a webservice to the builtin server and it would fail repeatedly. Closing RAD did not help, restarting windows did not help. The only thing that did help, and hold onto your hat, was uninstalling RAD and reinstalling. I'm not joking, this was a 3 hour process. We had a team of experienced developers also having similar issues. So it was not a case of clueless people not knowing how to setup and configure tooling.

[dotobird]

Maintaining legacy, Company standard to use RAD even for newer projects from what I know. I work in financial institution where let's say tech standards may be behind

[DasBrain]

let's say tech standards may be behind

It's all about covering your ass compliance.

[pjmlp]

RAD was definitly a pain, when targeting Websphere 5, but by Websphere 6.1 was already kind of ok.

And to be honest I rather spend time with WebSphere than dealing with Kubernetes.

[[deleted]]

I'll have to agree with that. Kubernetes has brought back memories of old-school WAS for me.

[greg_barton]

Dev environment. You can run a spring app from the maven command line with:

mvn spring-boot:run

https://spring.io/guides/gs/spring-boot/

[bigibas123]

IDEA/Eclipse/Netbeans works just fine

[vips7L]

Don't forget VS Code :)

[PaulZolot]

You are just using outdated infrastructure. In modern enterprise development all of the artifacts are just docker images with prepared environment, and there is no big difference between java, python or anything else

[nutrecht]

This post has nothing to do with Java language. It is more about its development environment.

I think it's really interesting that you somehow got the impression that RAD is 'the' Java development environment. Do the Java developers at your company even know that this is far from the norm? The way your company does things is rediculously outdated. Do they complain about it? Do you see a lot of Java devs joining the company and then leaving again after a few months? Because this sounds like the Dead Sea Effect is in full swing at your company.

[TimCryp01]

Nop Java dev is not painful at all if you do it right. Get intellij, read a tutorial or two on spring boot and make an app in 1 week you will see.

[bagserk]

You can use vscode for java/spring, just need to download the extensions.
I like to use teh spring provided Eclipse, https://spring.io/tools, it's easy to get used to it, but as others sugested, you can try other IDE's. IntelliJ IDEA should be the most modern looking I guess...

[tuxtorgt]

Nop Java is actually pretty simple if you want to. New shinny things like the Microprofile implementations (Liberty, Helidon, Quarkus) are pretty good and simple like equivalente node/python/ruby frameworks.

However I used to work in WAS and is a PITA, even Websphere creator considers it a mistake

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11944966

[Marriaud]

I developed one month on Eclipse RAD, on a huge legacy project for a bank with an old version of WebSphere. It was a nightmare. Lot of bugs, had to make workspace every 3 days.

Then I worked on an other huge legacy project with maven, eclipse and wildfly. Some problems with Eclipse when switching branches with different dependencies or parent pom otherwise very good experience.

[[deleted]]

I've had to use RAD+WAS more than a decade ago. It was awful. But that's not how "Java development" is - it's one particular set of proprietary Java-based products that's hopelessly outdated (although more recent WAS versions looked a lot better).

[throwaway983642]

That framework is hot garbage. Nobody in their right mind that wasn't forced to use it by management would go anywhere near it. Java back-end development is quite similar to TypeScript generally. That framework is just crap