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Spring: Simple getting complicated?
Submitted by Josh Fruhlinger on Tue, 10/20/2009 - 11:26.
It's no secret that large, unwieldy products tend to get larger and less wieldy over time. It's not anybody's fault, really; it's just that large, unwieldy products have huge user bases, all of whom use it for somewhat different things, all of whom pay good money for it, all of whom want their needs met and their use cases improved. Then one day everyone wakes up and realizes the thing is a mess, and start looking for something easier to use.
That, more or less, is what happened to Java Enterprise Edition, which led, among other things, to the advent of the Spring Framework. Now Spring itself is evolving to add new features and please more customers with its 3.0 release; will this kill some of the simplicity that made it so popular in the first place.
A lot of the new features sound like they'd be quite appealing -- REST capabilities! Streamlined Spring bean configuration! Shortcut annotation! But the thing that really jumps out at me is the introduction of Spring expression language (SpEL). Yes, I know that in general Spring precludes the use of the endless XML configuration files required by Java EE; but I think once you've introduced your own expression language, things are starting to get kind of gnarly.
But maybe I'm wrong! What's your expectation for Spring Framework 3.0?
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A lot of the new features
A lot of the new features sound like they'd be quite appealing -- REST capabilities!
I think one of the important
I think one of the important points to realize is that as Spring gets more features, almost all existing apps that don't use those features can upgrade to 3.0 without making any changes (unless they were using the monolithic jar, which I believe is phased out in 3.0).
Using the newer features is very modular. If you need it, you include the jar file for it, and you add the schema references to your configs. If you were forced to reference Spring APIs in your code, then you might need additional changes.
Despite all that, none of this would be workable if they didn't produce quality documentation every release. I always read the doc for the new release, almost cover to cover. It's much easier to read than most specs.
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