I think the general adversity against this specialized configurations is that they often tend to be fairly limited/rigid in what they can do, and if you want to customize anything you have to rewrite the whole thing. They effectively lock you into one black box of doing things, and getting out of it can be very painful.
Re:Rating 26 years of Java changes
by 2muchcoffeeman on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:24PM
(#45553641)
Spring boot just provides what they think are reasonable defaults and you provide some specifics.
You can always inject your own implementation if needed right?
In theory, yes. In practice, I've found that things get really complicated as soon as you start trying to interact with the spring lifecycle. Figuring out how to customize things and manage priority is the trickiest thing in Spring, IMO.
Please use the facilities of the framework for debugging any lifecycle issues. I was surprised when I found out that people did not use `--debug` for example or enabled logging of application startup events.
If you prefer GUI, Intellij even has a Spring Debugger: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/spring-debugger.html
I stopped using Spring Debugger because for some inexplicable reason enabling it makes breaking at the breakpoint take minutes instead of seconds. For quite a while I didn't realize this was the problem, as IntelliJ started having it turned on by default at some point.
Fair point, honestly. It could easily be a skill issue from not doing this particular type of thing all that often.
Spring is written by a committee of junior developers trying to implement the ideas from a committee of slightly less junior developers. Which is to say it's a huge unintelligible mess. As the other commenter attest, it works really well if you need the one thing it does - unfortunately the moment you need something slightly different you are forced to dig deep into the insane internals and it is a disaster. This moment comes very quickly too in every project because it was written by people with no experience in real projects.
Oh, I think it’s quite wonderful really. There are cases where the limited nature of some configuration-based things ends up being a mess (one that comes to mind is a feature in Spring Data where you can extend a DAO bean into a rest service through annotations, but it turns out that this feature (at least when I last tried working with it), is so rigid as to be nearly useless in actual practice. But our codeless application was a bit of brilliance, I think.
Yes, it’s weird how that’s still Java, but using standard components and only using code as glue where it’s absolutely necessary seems very similar to other engineering disciplines to me.