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{% block subSectionClasses %}about{% endblock %}
{% block meta_title %}About{% endblock %}
{% block meta_description %}Information about Spincast / Philosophy / Team{% endblock %}
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{#==========================================
Why Spincast?
==========================================#}
Why Spincast?
We tried a lot of Java web frameworks in the past few years, in addition to the obvious Spring Framework
with which we already had a lot of experience. Sadly, there was always a little something we dislike.
The main issue with most of the frameworks out there, in our opinion, is that they
are often too opinionated. We are grown-up developers, and we don't like when a framework
tells us how things have to be done. We wanted a flexible framework which
would allow developers to override pretty much everything, even if that means they would also be
able to break everything!
We wanted a framework which would feel as much as possible like a library.
A framework made to be extensible, from the ground up.
We created Spincast in an attempt to be that flexible framework we were looking for.
Of course, it is still young and will need improvements when new real-life use
cases emerge. But the core ideology will always stay "Power to the developers".
In Spincast, everything is configurable, everything can be tweaked.
{#==========================================
What about Spring Framework?
==========================================#}
What about Spring Framework?
Spring Framework / Spring Boot is by far
the most popular Java framework. If you are looking for a framework with a very large community
and for which paid support is available, look no further, you will not find anything better!
We used Spring a lot before starting Spincast.
The problem we had with Spring, is that we found ourself asking those questions too often:
-
"How can I modify that default behavior?"
-
"How do I configure this component?"
-
"How can this work since I didn't even configure it?"
-
"What does this annotation actually do? Can I tweak its behavior?"
Our experience with Spring Framework is that it tends to be a little bit too
magical, it tends to hide implementation details too much
so your application is harder to configure and tweak. In the name of "Defaults that are good enough 80% of the time",
Spring sometimes seems to favor simplicity over providing full control.
Any real-world application will be part of that
20% requiring a lot of manual tweaking, so why not base it on a framework that favors
flexibility and control from the ground up?
Yes, it is very easy to start a new Spring Boot application using their
pretty Initializr! But as long as you
have developed at least one real application in your life, you know that this kind of
simple bootstrapping is smoke and mirrors: you will have to
modify/change/replace components at some points or another. You will
have to manually control what is actually happening behind the scene.
Also, Spring relies a lot on annotations: that contributes to the
"easy to use" aura. But, as we explain here, we are
not big fans of annotations.
In the other hand, the very first goal of Spincast is to make modifying anything a borderline trivial task. If
you find something that is not easily modifiable and should be, it will be considered as a bug and
will be fixed.
Here is how you tweak almost anything in a Spincast application:
-
You identify the class containing the code you want to tweak and the interfaces this
class is bound to in the Guice context.
-
You extend this class to override/tweak/add anything you need. There are
no private methods so sky is the limit here.
-
In your application's Guice module, you bind your custom implementation.
-
Done. No magic. No components hard to extend.
Even Spincast's core components can be modified using those simple steps.
In other words, we would say that the main difference between Spring and Spincast
is that Spincast favors long term flexibility and control from the ground up, while Spring
seems more preoccupied with providing something that is easy to start with.
{#==========================================
The choices we made
==========================================#}
The choices we made
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Java
==========================================#}
Java
Haters gonna hate!
Java has a lot of haters, these days. On some forums, you almost feel bad to say you're a fan of the language!
But the reality is that there are a lot of happy Java developers out there.
Maybe they are discreet simply because they're just comfortable with their
tools and don't care to argue?
Java is a mature statically typed language; the JVM is freaking performant, and the library
ecosystem is huge! Also, the various IDEs and tools are top notch, they allow a
fantastic coding/refactoring experience.
Those who say Java is bloated and too complex, are clearly not aware of the modern frameworks
and probably still have in mind the old days of J2EE or the applets disaster.
Java may be somewhat verbose, and that's true in some cases, but that is not a bad thing in our opinion:
verbosity doesn't necessarily mean
"hard to read and understand"... In fact, we find that it is often the opposite!
Very compact one-liners full of lambdas are often way harder to understand than a
couple lines of explicit anonymous classes. And, anyway, Java now has lambdas. Finally, it is your
choice if you prefer to call your variables and methods "ulf" and "create()" instead of
"userListFactory" and "createDynamicRouteHandler()". But we, personally,
like verbosity almost as much as we hate buzzwords and hyped technologies.
We have some experience outside Java too: with Node.js for example.
Being able to use one language
everywhere is an attractive idea, but Javascript? Javascript ??
TypeScript is an improvement,
but the coding experience, even if better than before, is far from the one provided by
the various Java tools.
C# and the .NET platform also provide that fantastic coding experience and maturity, but they are too
platform centric.
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Dependency Injection
==========================================#}
Dependency Injection
Once you've worked with dependency injection, it's hard to go back. To design a whole application
using DI may be tricky when you are new to it, but the reward is huge.
Being able to easily access the components you need
(by injecting them) and always be sure they are properly initialized? Easy testing? Easy implementation swapping?
Yes, please!
Guice is, in our opinion, the best dependency
injection library of the Java ecosystem. The way the modules
work together, and the fact that almost everything is statically typed, is just fantastic. Actually, the fact that Spincast
would be based on Guice from the ground up is probably the very first decision we made.
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Configuration over convention
==========================================#}
Configuration over convention
The opposite, convention over configuration, has its benefits. For example, it is easier to be up and running on
a project where conventions have been used. There is only one way of doing things, so any
project is similar to the other. There is also less boilerplate since some magic
is used: "That class name ends with "Controller"? Well, it is now a controller!"
We're not big fans of that kind of magic. We prefer when things are obvious because they have been
explicitly configured.
Also, conventions kind of restricts possibilities. "You want to structure a part of your application this
way because it makes more sense? I don't think so, sorry dude!".
Again, we're grown-up developers and we want the freedom to ajust what we want, to structure our application
as we want.
Configuration FTW!
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Plain Java code over annotations
==========================================#}
Plain Java code over annotations
Annotations are a double-edged sword. They are simple to use and often convenient, but they also
tend to hide logic and make things seem to work automagically. This is sometimes fine, but when you
need to understand exactly how things work, or when you need flexibility and control,
annotations can be a real pain.
Annotations are also limited in the way they can be used. They don't support Java code so adding
logic to them is hard : you can't use if / else conditions, you can't
call methods, etc. Some people try to get around this limitation by using
some kind of expression language, something like @MyAnnotation("${myVar + 42}")... But this is
only a hack : there is no type safety and it feels very unnatural in a Java application.
Annotations are very good at being flags, or at providing basic information about
an element. For example, the @Inject or @Override annotations are
perfectly fine : they don't hide anything and serve purely as indications. But some frameworks
have a tendency to use annotations for pretty much everything, and this is something
we do not agree with.
Spincast doesn't use many annotations
and will in general favor plain Java code when it's time to configure something. The
form validation we suggest is a good example :
it is purely based
on Java code, not on annotations such as Hibernate validator.
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Not fans of ORMs
==========================================#}
No ORM
We are definitively not fans of ORMs such as JPA/Hibernate. Our experience is that an ORM
may seem easy to use with a simple CRUD application, but as soon as you deal with a real-world application,
you discover its ugly hidden complexity...
We suggest you carefully read Pro JPA 2
to get an idea of the details you need to know to deal with JPA properly! It is not trivial. There
are a lot of corner cases.
Plain SQL is what we suggest, with the help of JDBC utilities. We are not
saying plain SQL is always easy, but at least you keep full control over what is going on.
For those reasons, you will probably never see an official Spincast JPA/Hibernate plugin.
The community may create one and we will link to it, but we will not support it.
We may consider developing official plugins for sane solutions such as JOOQ or
MyBatis at one point, though.
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Not asynchronous
==========================================#}
Not asynchronous
The problem with asynchronous code is that it's a lot harder
and trickier to get right. Thinking in an asynchronous manner when coding is not
natural! It is no coincidence that constructs like
promises,
generators
have been created: they try to make asynchronous coding less painful. The Async/Await pattern is ok,
but still hard to get right in some situations.
Don't get us wrong... We do love asynchronous processing at Spincast! We strongly believe that reactive patterns
using Message brokers / Queuing are very good approaches in many applications.
But the important thing to understand is that the
code itself doesn't have to be asynchronous for asynchronous patterns to be implemented! In fact, our opinion is that
they are more easy to implement using a synchronous code base.
So Spincast is synchronous, and this is clearly a conscious decision. You may say this is one of the
points where Spincast is not "flexible" and will probably never be.
{#==========================================
The choices we made / Private methods
==========================================#}
No private methods
There may be some exceptions, but there are practically no private methods in Spincast's core and
plugins: the default visibility for methods is protected.
But... Isn't this a bad practice? Shouldn't you hide your implementation details?
Well, it depends.
As we previously said, we're not fans of libraries/frameworks which are too opinionated or that use
static components that can't be extended. Developers should
always have full control over what's going on! And the "no private methods" decision
follows that principle.
More than one time we have encountered a library, or part of a framework, which was doing exactly
what we needed except a little something! In those cases, the solution is often
to extend the class containing the problematic code and to override a particular
method. But many libraries/frameworks make this very difficult by using private
visibility for lots of their methods. Yes, we get it: they hide their implementation details!
But, doing so, they prevent you from adjusting what you would need. So what do you do then? You hope for a code change
from the authors, or you simply stop using that library...
Of course, many libraries try to help you by providing some protected methods, but
the choices they made is not always the ones you need!
So, our mantra, once again: "Flexibility / Power to the developers"! In Spincast, there are no private
methods, at all. If you override a Spincast method because you have to, it is your responsibility as a developer
to adjust your code if the base code changes. But, at least, you can do it.
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