Re:Ask HN: Why don't more web projects start with a JVM stack?
by Chris2048 on Thursday February 04, 2016 @02:12PM
(#11036369)
Just my recollections of java dev from about 2yrs ago...
Maven was complex, with too many 'concepts' for a build system. It was a revelation when I discovered dependency download and jar creation through apache ivy. Did Gradle take off?
Tomcat in turn had problems too, I recall JBoss was a little more robust, but also complex.
I also found hibernate/spring to be confounded by differences between versions - the XML config (of which there was a lot) tended to change in format quite a bit, and there was an added complexity in figuring out how to get code, and xml, or even code-from-xml to behave intuitively. It felt like a massive ORM, written in XML and annotated java...
Java is an excellent battle ready language that stable components in a business can be ported into with excellent test coverage and the power of all the mature libraries and tools.
However in a startup where maybe the end goal isn't completely defined yet; there is prototyping code to see if it will eventually get used and plenty of LoC being thrown away, wrestling with added libraries and even the compile & deploy time of Spring + Tomcat can really slow development and increase complexity breeding frustration.