Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#1

Post by smorgusofborg » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 12:24 PM UTC

Hello,

I used Java a very long time ago, like 1.6, and I'm wondering what using Java at work in ~web backend looks like today.

What elements of your stack would you consider most important? Do most projects lean heavily on Spring Boot or something else? Which IDE? Pointers to refreshers or concise introductions you might give a new hire would be handy too.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#2

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:13 PM UTC

IntelliJ idea is the best IDE. JDK8 incorporated a lot of great functional programming ideas (though the streams library is awful.). Up through JDK17 there are many improvements including a more scalable runtime.

I haven’t been paid to work with Spring since 2013, every project I’ve worked on since has used Guice, maybe Dropwizard.

JAX-RS is the dominant paradigm for web back ends these days, particularly if you are writing single page applications.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#3

Post by biehl » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

Spring Boot is the go-to solution for Java where I work. And definitely Intellij as IDE.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#4

Post by Hardik_Shah » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

Over the last five years, the Java Platform has seen a tremendous amount of evolution and improvement in a variety of areas, including: language features in Java, Kotlin, and Scala; Functional Programming; dev environments; test workflows; Reactive; Stream processing; and distributed data.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#5

Post by omgmajk » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

IntelliJ Idea for sure.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#6

Post by sgt » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

omgmajk wrote: post #5

IntelliJ Idea for sure.

Also using IntellJ. But how is the landscape with the other IDE's these days - is NetBeans keeping up?

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#7

Post by watwut » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

omgmajk wrote: post #5

IntelliJ Idea for sure.

I am using it now because the team is using it, but cant figure out in which way it is supposed to be better then Eclipse. It looks somehow better, but it seems strictly inferior in terms of what it does for me.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#8

Post by jbellis » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

IntelliJ idea is the best IDE. JDK8 incorporated a lot of great functional programming ideas (though the streams library is awful.). Up through JDK17 there are many improvements including a more scalable runtime. I haven’t been paid to work with Spring since 2013, every project I’ve worked on since has used Guice, maybe Dropwizard. JAX-RS is the dominant paradigm for web back ends these days, particularly if you are…

I think the Streams designers did an amazing job. One of my favorite things about modern Java. Yes, it's more verbose than Python list comprehensions, but it's both higher-performance (parallelism that just works) and more productive (static typing means it almost always works as intended the first time).

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#9

Post by jbellis » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

Good summary of the language-level changes here: https://piotrminkowski.com/2021/02/01/new-developer-friendly...

ETA: actually if you haven't used it since 1.6 you'd want to find an article on Java 8 as well that covers Streams.

Re: Ask HN: What is a modern Java environment?

#10

Post by manishsharan » Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

biehl wrote: post #3

Spring Boot is the go-to solution for Java where I work. And definitely Intellij as IDE.

And Maven. Don't forget Maven.