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Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

> for example here’s a copy from Lightbend (the company behind Scala, Play & Lagom)

I use Play 2 for most of my projects and frankly knowing what I know about Spring and J2EE (even though having never worked with them for the same reason) I couldn't really think of any reason to choose either of these outdated behemoths. With something like Play 2 and Slick/JOOQ you could run circles around these two.

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You call Spring an outdated behemoth yet you have never worked with it. I've worked with EJB, Spring, Play, Dropwizard and a bunch of other stuff an I can tell that the current version of Spring is cutting edge and since they introduced java-based configuration you can really do stuff with it without the hassle which comes with other frameworks. Make yourself a favour and don't make a fool of yourself by bashing something you haven't even tried.

I can't agree enough. I can't find anything else with support that the Spring ecosystem has built for many cloud stacks (my experience is with AWS). Being able to choose from a whole host have identity providers, social, and other things for login and user data that generally just fits in to the normal auth and security mechanisms solves a problem we had for years with new applications.

It's certainly daunting if you're green to it and there isn't a grizzled vet around, but if you're trying to build for more than contrived simple solutions that you need to monitor, scale, and secure I don't know anything else out there that gets you so far down the road almost at the beginning.

I work with Spring everyday and really appreciate how it simplifies many things with enterprise Java development. However that appreciation has come with a cost.

In the original "Java Development with the Spring Framework" in 2005, it was argued that J2EE was far too complex in order to be effective. Spring was going to provide a simplifying framework to make development easier.

To me it's ironic how Spring has evolved in complexity over the years, but it's the first framework any of us turn to.

Same here, Scala rocks ! Too bad play 2 is now using guice and promots runtime dependency injection like in Java world. Compile dependency injection is much better, I fear they'll try to mimick spring more and more in order to attract java crowds.

Hi, I'm on the Play team. We've got a number of projects showing compile time injection:

Java compile time DI:

https://github.com/playframework/play-java-compile-di-exampl...

Java compile time DI using Dagger 2:

https://github.com/playframework/play-java-dagger2-example

Scala compile time DI:

https://github.com/playframework/play-scala-compile-di-examp...

Scala compile time DI with Macwire:

https://github.com/playframework/play-scala-macwire-di-examp...

Thanks!

I got the same feeling here. Implicits in Scala can act as statically checked dependency injection, I don't know why they are going for this runtime dependant injection instead.

Play supports static DI aka cake pattern or macwire aswell.

Until you start working with Clojure or even Kotlin. Then Scala feels like a baroque behemoth.

Our stack uses both Play and Spring. Of course, Play is becoming more and more "opinionated" and not playing with others as well newer versions, so we are moving Spring Boot for the flexibility it provides.

Opinionated frameworks are fine to get started quickly, but for larger scale companies, you are gunna want flexibility beyond that.

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