Is spring as a framework becoming bulky?

[meenakshi sundar]

Hi Craig,

you had done a commendable work in your previous versions of spring in Action series ,I was big time reader of those books
I am getting a sense that spring as a platform is becoming bulky and more complex,What is your take on that?

Thanks
Meenakshi

[Jayesh A Lalwani]

Spring is designed to be modular. Spring Core forms the basis of all Spring modules, and is required. However, all the other modules are "optional". You choose the modules that you want.

As time is going by, people are adding more modules to the Spring "stack". So, yes, it is getting larger and larger. However, adopting Spring doesn't make your application bulky, because you take what you need.

[meenakshi sundar]

Thanks for the reply Jayesh,I accept some of your points.

The point i was trying to make is ,In silos they all will work fine ,Don't you think the decision making would become all the more tougher when you have to carefully pick and choose
the moving pieces that have become so large.

is simplicity of spring is loosing its sheen ?

[Jayesh A Lalwani]

Yes, picking and choosing the right Spring components can be challenging. However, that problems applies to almost every stack available in the market. You can pick any stack:- J2EE/Oracle/Spring/.NET. There is a learning curve to every application development stack

End of the day, Enterprise application development is hard. It's rather trivial to build a web application. It is much harder to build a web application that performs well, scales well, is secure, interacts with other systems, and is maintainable. You could build everything by hand, or you could borrow components from a framework. Learning a framework is hard. Building things by hand is harder.

[meenakshi sundar]

Yes indeed,In a way,Spring is addressing the the cross cutting concerns of the enterprise business needs and its agility like no other framework does.
What can we expect to see in this new edition of the Book in that line?

[Craig Walls]

The core Spring itself is not significantly larger than it ever has been. Like any project, the core framework has grown some here, lost some there, but it's not largely different than when it started. The Spring ecosystem...that is, the greater family of projects surrounding Spring...has absolutely grown to address a wide variety of development needs. Had it not done so, there'd be complaints that it hasn't evolved to meet the changing development landscape.

But it's like a buffet...you have a great deal of choice, but you don't have to choose everything. Some people do choose a lot, but that's either because they do need it or because they don't know any better. Is your app dealing with a Mongo database? If not, then there's no reason to include Spring Data Mongo. Are you using JPA? If not, then you can leave out the core framework's ORM module. Pick what you need, leave out what you don't. The core framework is modular and is itself a module of the greater Spring ecosystem.

What does the new edition cover in this regard? Nothing really. It describes the options available, goes into detail on many of them (not all or else it'd be a several thousand page book), but it assumes that the reader is able to decide what they need and disregard what they don't.

meenakshi sundar wrote:Yes indeed,In a way,Spring is addressing the the cross cutting concerns of the enterprise business needs and its agility like no other framework does.
What can we expect to see in this new edition of the Book in that line?

[meenakshi sundar]

Thanks Craig for posting the reply personally ,I appreciate it ,Covering the complete ecosystem of Spring would not serve well,As always i m looking forward for a crisp and concise edition.