Drawbacks of Spring

[Jagadeesh Sadashiv]

Hello,

Recently in an interview I was asked to list the drawbacks of using Spring. I could not think of anything. I searched for it on Internet and I did not find much. Do you know if Spring has a drawbacks ?

Jagadeesh.

[Stephan van Hulst]

You can't really name drawbacks unless you have something to compare it it. Do you mean drawbacks of using Spring as compared to bare servlets without additional frameworks?

[Jesper de Jong]

One drawback that I could think of, is that it has a steep learning curve. You need to understand a number of concepts before you can use Spring effectively.

Also, it can sometimes be a bit complicated to see how Spring wires different components together. A good IDE which understands Spring can make it easier to navigate bean dependencies.

[Paul Anilprem]

Jagadeesh Sadashiv wrote:Hello,

Recently in an interview I was asked to list the drawbacks of using Spring. I could not think of anything. I searched for it on Internet and I did not find much. Do you know if Spring has a drawbacks ?

Jagadeesh.

As Stephen said, you need to compare it with alternatives. In that sense, it is a very good question from the candidate's POV because it gives you an opportunity to show case pretty much all of your knowledge and experience. You can start with spring vs no-spring and move on to spring vs some other DI.
IMHO, steep learning is curve is a lame disadvantage I wouldn't mention it at all.
Managing the versioning of spring core and its supporting jars manually is a big pain. It takes a while to set them all up correctly even in build tools.

[Jesper de Jong]

Paul Anilprem wrote:IMHO, steep learning is curve is a lame disadvantage  I wouldn't mention it at all.

I've worked with people who didn't want to use Spring because they didn't understand it and thought it was too difficult. But that probably says more about those people than about the quality of the Spring Framework...

Paul Anilprem wrote:Managing the versioning of spring core and its supporting jars manually is a big pain. It takes a while to set them all up correctly even in build tools.

It's not a good idea to try to control all the dependencies and versions yourself, that will indeed quickly lead to a hard to maintain mess. Spring helps you with that if you use the Spring BOM (Bill of Materials) pom.xml file.

[Paul Anilprem]

Jesper de Jong wrote:

Paul Anilprem wrote:Managing the versioning of spring core and its supporting jars manually is a big pain. It takes a while to set them all up correctly even in build tools.

It's not a good idea to try to control all the dependencies and versions yourself, that will indeed quickly lead to a hard to maintain mess. Spring helps you with that if you use the Spring BOM (Bill of Materials) pom.xml file.

And that's my point. You've got to learn maven (or some other build tool) now