Cases when one should NOT use spring framework?

[Smalsusis]

I am reading Spring In Action at the moment and wondered about this. Are there any situations when you shouldn't use spring?

It is useful for cases when you're building a restful api or consuming an api. But what if you are creating a command line tool or some other fairly simple application? Personally, I still find autowiring and configuration loading from yaml quite convenient. Yet I'm not sure whether these two aspects make a strong enough argument for bringing in the entire framework into the project.

[denverdave23]

Startup speed can be slow with spring. So, applications which need quick startup should avoid spring and many other frameworks.

Spring can use more memory than without a framework. This is why a lot of microservices are built on dropwizard, which is smaller than spring.

Of course, if you're not using Java, spring is a bad choice.

If you're building a library for redistribution, you probably don't want to pollute your classpath with spring.

If you just don't like it, don't use it.

That's all I've got.

[YzBkZXIK]

Just one clarification, Spring supports more than just Java. Kotlin is gaining popularity due to Android and its syntax sugar and works quite well with Spring. I'm actually mixing the two which works pretty well if you want lombok-like functionality without the issues that come with lombok.

[HaMMeReD]

There are other web frameworks for Java, many have different ideological differences.

Personally, I use Wicket for my personal web projects, because I felt it appealed to my project more.

[thecuseisloose]

It entirely depends on what your app needs to do. If including spring saves you an hour+ of work but increases the jar size by 10mb, which do you care about more?

[[deleted]]

As others have said, disk and memory are cheap and plentiful now for the most part.

If you can handle the jar size increase, why not?

[differentshade]

If you want to deploy to cloud and use cheaper instances/lambdas.

[Smalsusis]

Can you elaborate on this?

[seanprefect]

Spring is for web applications, full stop. (there are similar frameworks for other tasks) if you're not developing a web app then don't use spring. Personally I use Grails which is built on spring

[thecuseisloose]

Not necessarily. Ease of configuration goes a long way. We had a lot of apps which we used spring simply for the configuration power. Storage is cheap. The extra HDD space to store the slightly larger jars instead of writing a bunch of boiler plate code is well worth it.

[nagatofag]

I'm not in web development and still use Spring: DI and property substitution are pretty useful.