Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

It is little secret to readers of this space that I have never really "gotten" Spring. The adding of 6,000,000 dependencies to my code to give me the functionality I can write my self in 20 lines of code vs 10 lines of configuration has never really seemed worth it to me.

This, however, I find fucking funny. Yes, now we put this configuration in a Java Class! Meaning you get all the dependencies of Spring with all the flexibility of compiled Java!

Really, why the fuck now just have a hand coded implementation factory for your project that you change to give you the objects you need?

All jokes aside, Spring has its place, but looking at the code I have been working with today, it is still a huge evil imposed on the world by well meaning people. I can understand using Spring at the Application level. The problem you get is what I saw today, where you have a LIBRARY which might or might not be in a Spring app that depends on Spring. This library had other problems that are, in fact, comical, but the Spring thing just kills me.

I recently put together an in-house universal DataSource access layer. It works on our system property switched environment settings and you can use JNDI datasources, and Spring or simple .props file configured Commons-JDBC datasources or basic free-connect datasources. This is the thing with library design: a "library" should be flexibile enough to fit into the the environment you are using, not impose one upon you. So much "Spring" stuff seem to be a basic library that just wants to impose Spring and its myriad dependencies upon your project and that is just a pain in the add.

Now I know I am bitching alot about Deps, and there are some people who would laugh at me, because in some apps, if a library has 1 method I want, I will import it. The difference is, those are Applications, not libraries. Libraries are like databases: Sometimes to need to de-normalize them to make them easier to use. I am always a fan of web services for big stuff, because you get a certain level of isolation in this kind of thing, but if all you need to do is download a file, don't fucking include Commons-HTTP.