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An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

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Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#281

Post by yawz »

bsaul wrote: post #6

I'm back to java after having an unsatisfying experience 2 years ago with Spring MVC, (this time i use the "play framework"), and it seems to confirm my intuition that the language itself is really just fine. The problem lies more in bloated frameworks and corporate culture where everything needs to be standardized, regulated, and the purpose of a mandatory non-free training session. Add to that the fact that every s…

> The problem lies more in bloated frameworks...

How ironic... I was an early adopter of Spring, when it was all about simple "enterprise development without J2EE". So, given enough time, does bloat follow success and does it become inevitable?

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#282

Post by turar »

mahmud wrote: post #256
turar wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just recently trying to decide between "new" Spring MVC, Dropwizard, and Play. Spring now has a bunch of slick-looking guides and tutorials. But then I looked at the actual contents of their tutorial project, and it just turned me off. For an "example" REST project, they had over 50 classes not including tests: https://github.com/spring-guides/tut-rest/tree/master/6/comp... , with many being "event" classes of…

Been there done that. 3.5 years of Play 1, but they decided to rewrite it in Scala and I left in anger. Nearly one year now of servlet dev, trying nearly anything I can get my hands on. Most I have been satisfied with is Restlet for service development, otherwise nothing even comes close to Play 1. Finally decided to harden up and learn Scala. I have set my prejudices aside and after a month, I can safely say I am a…

I actually started learning Scala: completed Odersky's Coursera class and developed a Play 2 project in Scala. Overall I like it, but reading others' code is often frustrating, shorthand shortcuts in language are still kinda alien looking, and even figuring how to handle simple things like multi-file upload with Play's controllers, I feel I don't quite understand what the hell is going on underneath all that magical functional code that I myself wrote by assembling bits and pieces from elsewhere.

And then I watch stuff like Paul Phillips presentations [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jh94gowim0] and I just don't know whether continuing to invest my time in Scala is a wise decision long-term.

I'll probably try Clojure at some point, but for production-grade projects I will do Java for now. I feel the most frustrating thing about tech is having to place bets constantly on what to invest your time learning. It's eerily similar to investing in stocks. You never know what's going to live or die. And I'm saying this as a former Delphi developer with multi-year experience. :)

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#283

Post by turar »

Omnipresent wrote: post #253
turar wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just recently trying to decide between "new" Spring MVC, Dropwizard, and Play. Spring now has a bunch of slick-looking guides and tutorials. But then I looked at the actual contents of their tutorial project, and it just turned me off. For an "example" REST project, they had over 50 classes not including tests: https://github.com/spring-guides/tut-rest/tree/master/6/comp... , with many being "event" classes of…

I'm using Dropwizard for the same reason. It is dead simple and gets me going out of the box. You should also give Grails a try if you plan on having a view layer

Dropwizard seems to have a view layer of its own that you can bolt on as well.

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#284

Post by darylteo »

wil421 wrote: post #124

>But the modern Java developer uses Gradle...there are quite a few things that are quite, though not very, common, but still require dropping down to imperative Groovy. This is the first time I have heard of Gradle, but why would I use a build tool that requires me to learn Groovy. If I already know Java I wont be learning something new just to build a Java project. I find a lot of development tools/frameworks make m…

What if I told you that Java code is perfectly compilable in Groovy and learning the required amount of Groovy isn't that much anyway?

There's even a JavaDoc that you can reference at any time.

And even now in Java 8, you have Lambdas... well guess what? Groovy uses Closures everywhere, and the syntax is similar too. So it really shouldn't be black magic.

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#286

Post by peterashford »

zwieback wrote: post #26

I'm using Java for the first time because of Android. I had played with Java when it first came out but have stayed with C/C++/C# for almost everything. I have to say that my Java experience isn't as unpleasant as I thought it would be. I always thought C# is what Java should have been but after learning a little idiomatic Java the reality is quite okay, really.

Anyone looking at where "enterprise" Java went - the whole J2EE monstrosity - would have run screaming. But the basic language is actually quite good and has been for a long time.

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#287

Post by scottu1 »

lmm wrote: post #131
twistedpair wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's Play! compare to Spring? I'm working on a bloated Spring whale (1.5M LoC, 485 Spring XML config files) and wondering if something like Play! can do it better, or if complexity is simply a beast that will inevitably turn any project into a turgid mass. I ask since friends at Google will laugh at a bar if you even say "Spring," but I'm curious what else can do it all (Guice/Gin?). Perhaps nothing can and the tric…

Spring is a huge umbrella project that contains many parts, some good, some not so good. Guice or picocontainer work well, but you can achieve the same effect by using spring's Java configuration and avoiding silly things (AOP, shudder), and that way you can migrate existing spring XML piece by piece. If you're writing an actual webapp (i.e. something that outputs html) then I highly recommend Wicket; it's the most b…

I'm with you that Spring has ALOT of parts. At my company they allowed us to use some parts of Spring and not others. Our stack was Spring MVC, with Apache Tiles, serving JSPs with some JQuery in there all wrapped up with Spring Security. It was much better than what we had before, JSF and ICEFaces and ADF. JSF frustrates me to no end.

Now we're moving towards a more modern stack. Using Jersey for REST is nice. It does make me enjoy Java again. You annotate resources in a Spring-like way, security was easy to implement. On the front-end we use a client side JavaScript Framework, JMVC (CanJS, EJS, etc). JMVC doesn't have as much traction as other frameworks, like Angular or Ember, but it is stable and covers what we need.

But when I go home, I try to stay away from Java. It's mostly Python (Flask, Tornado, Twisted) or lately some Node (Express) on the backend and Ember on the front. It's psychological. I program at work for work and at home to have fun. For me it just feels easier and more fun to stream code in Python.

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#288

Post by tkubacki »

turar wrote: post #202
bsaul wrote: post #6

I'm back to java after having an unsatisfying experience 2 years ago with Spring MVC, (this time i use the "play framework"), and it seems to confirm my intuition that the language itself is really just fine. The problem lies more in bloated frameworks and corporate culture where everything needs to be standardized, regulated, and the purpose of a mandatory non-free training session. Add to that the fact that every s…

I was just recently trying to decide between "new" Spring MVC, Dropwizard, and Play. Spring now has a bunch of slick-looking guides and tutorials. But then I looked at the actual contents of their tutorial project, and it just turned me off. For an "example" REST project, they had over 50 classes not including tests: https://github.com/spring-guides/tut-rest/tree/master/6/comp... , with many being "event" classes of…

I'm using Dropwizard and it was easy enough for me - former .NET developer to get things done quickly. That said if I was starting today long term project I would go with Dartlang (yes they'are server side as well)

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#289

Post by spullara »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #273
pjmlp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have since repent myself. Google did indeed managed to pull a Microsoft and now we have a forked Java implementation getting steady behind the standard Java implementations. Even J2ME is more compatible with its big brother than Android. KitKat has now partial support for Java 7, with libraries still missing some pieces. Dalvik and ART still don't support invokedynamic bytecode. And since almost no one has KitKat,…

> Even J2ME is more compatible with its big brother than Android. Are you serious? J2ME is even more crippled than Android's Java (no reflection, no Swing, no AWT and stuck in Java 1.4). J2ME has been dead for more than half a decade and we have Android to thank for that. Good riddance.

I'm not sure where you get your information about this, but J2ME 8 was released alongside Java 8:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/overview/jav...

Re: An Opinionated Guide to Modern Java Development, Part 1

#290

Post by spullara »

_pmf_ wrote: post #68
spullara wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good reason that Sun didn't want this to happen and tried to stop it in court — successful against Microsoft, failed against Google. If I remember right, most everyone on here was rooting for Google to win and continue to fragment the language.

The question is what Oracle would lose by licensing real Java to Google at reasonable conditions. Mobile non-Android Java is deader than dead.

Oracle was offering licensing for "real Java" at around $1 per device. This was too high for Google that wanted to make it entirely free. Kind of silly, since Android hardware manufacturers pay much more than that to Microsoft in patent licenses.
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