Right? We already over the explosion. Backend development is not complex, it's mature. With spring boot + initializer + bean based configuration, REST interfaces everywhere, maven and gradle are both great what's not to like?

Can you tell me exactly what kind of beans you have in your simple spring boot app, and how request processing works step by step?

* * *

I used CORBA once about 20 years ago to talk between a C++ server and a Java EJB server. It was pretty ok? It beat hand wiring TCP protocols. I'm not sure hand-wiring REST calls is much better. At least we have gRPC now.

My first real paid job was using CORBA to communicate from the Java applet running in the browser to the Java proxy running on the web server and then to an app server. Later I also worked with RMI, DCOM, etc.

I also used both DCOM and CORBA at later jobs for Soft-Realtime/Embedded distributed systems.

I’d say statically typed IDLs are much better than all these REST/HTTP/JSON/CRUD approach. That’s why I prefer GraphQL and gRPC/ProtoBuffers.

Not the least important thing is that having a statically-typed and well documented schema reduce the amount of required communication between the developers, and also reduces the number of misunderstandings, mistakes, and bugs.

I did Java EE, Glassfish, JSF/IceFaces for my first job and at the same time I could have ftp'd a PHP/Perl script on a free host and called it a day (had I known better).

I think Devops has a played a huge role in why things have gotten more complicated. They want Kubernetes to be the solution to all problems. Heroku has fallen out of fashion for literally no reason. They won't even consider ElasticBeanstalk or App runner for even the smallest of projects. Companies would rather hire a 200k plus benefits person instead of paying a few hundred dollars more a month on hosted solutions. I've honestly never seen anything like it.

You're oversimplifying the problem and/or not viewing the problem for the organization. Maybe for an individual developer it's easier to create a Dyno or a Beanstalk deployment, but it's not necessarily easier for the organization.

IMO, Kubernetes solves a lot of issues for both camps but most of the Kubernetes detractors I've met are only hostile to it because of ignorance, not any reasonable criticisms. "It's different, it's hard or it's something I don't know" aren't valid excuses.

Easier to deploy for the developers is better for the organization. The dev team should own this process since they are the ones that probably have to support it. Objectively, deploying on any of the more managed AWS services, App Runner, ECR, Beanstalk is better for the org. Less risk if someone is leaving, vs the 3 terabytes of Kubernetes scripts required. The team knows how to manage and deploy their stuff so when they're on call they know how to fix it. Why would someone learn Kubernetes when you can spend 5 minutes learning Beanstalk or App Runner?

Things were never a problem when devs just managed this stuff. We used Heroku or Capistrano on plain EC2 and it was fine. Once you hit scale and things become more expensive then Docker on ECR / Fargate is fine. This whole dev ops fad just has to go.

Anecdotally, I was part of an organization that was all in on Beanstalk (hundreds of apps) that did a full migration to Kubernetes and we ended up reducing our spend, deploy times and pipeline complexity by half. We're talking a total yearly cloud spend probably near 9 digits. Moving to Kubernetes vastly simplified our lives and developers were able to learn it pretty easily. Development team was in the low hundreds.

So for every story I hear about "it was better back then", I just remember how much it was a horror for us and find it really hard to believe people voicing these options are actually arguing in good faith.

If that's your experience with it, then it sounds like a success and I'll concede that.

My experience is: devops is introduced to 2 orgs I was at (much smaller dev teams) to save money. Even though hiring devops negates any savings, but that's another story. They introduce Kubernetes (even though existing solutions were fine) as the flavor of the month to build up their resumes. They all leave after 6 months to a year and dev teams are stuck with the cleanup trying support and be in call for things we had no say in. It's harder to see logs, get a rails console, deploy, debug, etc.

Meanwhile they also spent 6 months trying to get PR apps and staging environments at one company. Something that is one click on Heroku.

If we didn't have Heroku at these companies when we started out we would have literally failed. End of story.

Personal rant: the solution to fixing a broken k8s installation made by a previous team in an attempt at some sort "enterprisey" lock-in is, apparently, wiping the clusters and creating a new k8s from scratch.

This isn't the future I wanted, let's solve these problems in some other way. K8s seems to be the second-system effect in all the worst ways.

Sounds like an unfortunate edge case that shouldn't detract from all the good things Kubernetes affords.

I haven't seen any good things brought by Kubernetes.

My main complaint about Kubernetes is that it feels like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm - unless you're FAANG-scale, the extra overhead and complexity it imposes to use it at all massively outweigh its benefits. And it's usually not that it's different things that you have to understand, but rather that it's more things, to accomplish the same final goal. E.g., to set up networking without Kubernetes, you need to understand traditional networking architecture, but to set up networking with Kubernetes, you need to understand traditional networking Architecture and the Kubernetes way of doing networking.

The frontend answer to complexity had to do with young/new devs fomo’ing into resume driven development and augmenting their growing identity/ego as a developer.

But this Java shit, that has to all come from enterprise solutions right? I can’t imagine there were tons of influencer-like blog posts that JavaScript had. What hell hole did those Java ideas even come from?

Blah. One way or another, people manage to fuck everything up. We just can’t have nice things.

I think some of this is because it's way harder to write a new library for a well-established language & ecosystem and become well-known for it, than it is to do the same in a new ecosystem. This goes for languages and frameworks both—React, for example, generated tons of opportunities like this, to become known for something by basically solving a problem that'd already been solved 1,000 times—but with React.

Like, if you want to build your résumé and get offered some of the cushier programming-adjacent gigs and get to present at prominent conferences and generally become A Name, how likely is that to happen if you try to launch some big web framework, or an auth library, or an ORM—in Ruby? Or Java? Nah, too crowded.

But if you pick some up-and-coming language (that's up and coming in part because everyone involved is doing exactly what you're trying to do) or hook your wagon to some new framework's (or database's, et c.) hype cycle, well, now you're talking. As a bonus, many of these projects require little or no novelty—it's all well-trod territory. Just half-competently do what hundreds of others have already done, succeed at promoting it (tellingly, this is the harder part) and you're a rockstar. And hell, maybe doing all that does demonstrate some kind of remarkable and valuable skill, for all I know!

But the point is, if that's the kind of thing you're trying to do, you need churn, and a bunch of people all trying to accomplish the above drives that very churn. Very little of that activity actually advances the industry, and the churn itself is a huge drag on everything.

15-25 years ago, there were hip-for-the-time tech influencer bloggers who would write all sorts of stuff about whatever new frameworks and tech were available in the Java world.

If you take all the scary Java Enterprise buzzwords in one of the previous posts on this thread, and look them up, you'll find that they all came about, roughly, between 1999 and 2007.

I don't fully remember what all the hip influencer tech blogs were during that era (I recall "Joel on Software" having been important), but I do remember that people who paid more attention to such things were really into "Enterprise Java Beans" at the time.

So the JVM world might suffer from a bit of an analogous problem. But that world's complexity explosion was decades ago.

My feeling is that backend has always been complex, depending on the scale you were trying to operate at (and how much scale your framework and ecosystem forced you to think about whether you wanted to or not). The best you can do to mitigate it is continually ask "Do I really need my backend to handle the scale I'm designing it for?" and "Is all of the complexity in my preferred stack still necessary, or can some of it be hidden/automated?"

Heh. So propaganda (or marketing as we now know it) has always worked.

When are we ever going to get hip to that reality?

I try to remember that this decades cool hip software trends might become the next decade's enterprise Java.

And that's the outcome for the successful stuff!

(Doesn't mean you shouldn't get into it though -- if I'd jumped on enterprise java 20 years ago, I'd probably be richer than I ended up by just working on the software I was interested in)

The response I dont see represented is that we were more ambitious in the past. There were all kinds of negative effects, bad tools & out-of-touch architecting that was begot; we can acknowledge that, certainly. But that almost all representation of Java here so emphatically emphasize only the negatively bias, without recongizing also some of the idealism, hope, & progress is to our loss.

We were also trying really cool things with many of these java efforts. Rather than a main() routine that imperatively did everything, there were future-sightes notions that we could have a bunch of ambient systems available & interconnected. OSGI solved some thorny library versioning problems, and as a bonus allowed for a very strongly manageable runtime for modules. EJB brought objects up to a higher level, a greater management tier with more interoperability of objects across instances. We were interested in trying more, in tackling harder problems, that microservice era has masked over, deliberately chosen to ignore.

Over time we got more refined forms of many of these systems. Maven calmed much of the ad-hoc madness of Ant. CDI was a more reasonable EJB with event more competent management. JSP kept getting better component libs. OSGi actually was... decent all along, sometimes legit useful.

But the idea that Java was absurdly troubled seems to endure & be enormously popular hatred/FUD to spread. The fads of today are exactly the opposite of the better managed more flexible runtime trend, where the JVM keeps rising as a more capable, flexible, malleable, adaptable, controllable way to tackle processes than the processes at an OS level. And certainly, there's a lot of ease we've bought ourselves by doing much much less. Statically compiled binaries are an example of yet another means of doing less, of finding easy routes; powerful simplifications that have greatly eased many folk's lives.

Less is great, sure. Isolated container instances with dedicated apps is pretty easy to deal with. But there are still constant undercurrents, pushing us towards more interesting complected runtime arraingements, where virtual machines (not fully virtualized os'es but systems like glassfish or erlang, where many sub-processes are co-resident) come back. The idea of very quick very easy to spawn sub-processes allows for interesting security & modularity, where-as today services are almost all monolithic app servers that have complicated multi-user authentication & authorization concerns. We could make simpler safer software if we had more complex runtimes; it's a trade-off, and im deciding we have gone too-deep, unleashed monsters, we have perhaps too polarized ourselves against many of the great capabilities we one tried for.

Does SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory not simply spring to your mind when you're coding solutions? /s

Can you explain what that is or what’s it’s trying to do?

I’m 27 and my first job was OSGI at a Java shop.

That was some convoluted shit. Class path errors, coupled to blueprint XML and fancy IDE stuff.

I’ve worked in different languages and frameworks since and love the simplicity of Go. Excited to learn Rust

Hum... I've done this, and no, the "multiple interdependent microservices" over kubernetes architecture is much worse.