My recent post on Spring 2.0 was featured on the front page of TheServerSide. This brought some nice traffic, but most people left immediately and nobody bothered to leave even a short comment. Probably those who felt like commenting did so on TheServerSide’s own forum.
Reading those comments, I’m amazed at the amount of ignorance that is on display there. Comparing Spring to Struts and turning the former down because it’s not “standard” doesn’t reflect to well on the poster’s knowledge or intelligence.
Anyway, what I want to tell the TSS crowd is that you should take my extreme assertion (”I seriously wonder why anyone would want to develop anything substantial in Java nowadays without using Spring.”) with a grain of salt. Can you say “hyperbole”?
What prompted me to write that sentence was not much my fondness of Spring’s features and architectural beauty, which is certainly there. I just wanted to express my admiration for Spring’s core team dedication to its users and to the quality of its product. Doing a major release that is 100% backward-compatible, to the point of being able to simply drop the new library in place of the old one and have everything still work perfectly, is not something that happens frequently, particularly in the Open Source world.
So, if you want to find a way to architect your J2EE applications in a simple, lightweight, flexible and testable way, have a look at Spring. You won’t probably use everything of it, but that’s just fine. And you’ll certainly find that the parts you end up using will make your life easier.
Ugo, I understood the tone of the post - and I felt that even with the hyperbole, the question has merit. Spring is turning into a valid deployment platform in and of itself, and most people who, uh, have “drunk the kool-aid” can’t imagine coding J2EE - even with EJBs, MDBs, etc. - without it.
You probably understand that anyone can post anything on TSS. There are thousands of people reading and posting to TSS, so you get the good and the bad.
People do not feel compelled to post things in other people’s blogs, but you will always catch a few to read your blog if you have interesting things to say.
On another tangent - I was looking at Butterfly (”Cocoon with Spring”). Is that something that is actively developed? I think I got sensored trying to post a question about it on the Cocoon user mailing list. The mail did not bounce back, so I know it got there.