Why Java Isn’t Dead: A Developer’s Take on Spring, Microservices, and KISS

To align with the new job’s tech stack, the author revisited Java after a three‑year hiatus, noting that the surge of containers and micro‑services has revived interest in the language despite its earlier decline.

Micro‑services are praised for scalability, high availability, simplified concurrency handling, and portability through containerization, prompting a re‑evaluation of Java and the notoriously heavyweight Spring framework.

Java and Spring Rituals

The Spring framework has become massive and confusing, filled with endless annotations that force developers to rely on tutorials or example code, making the documentation a daunting task.

Spring’s “single‑line” annotations and wrappers hide complexity, leading to excessive class instantiation and bean injection that obscure what the code actually does.

Even Lombok, a library that auto‑generates boilerplate code, contributes to this over‑abstraction, replacing explicit getters and setters with annotations like @NoArgsConstructor, which the author finds frustrating.

"Project Lombok is a Java library that plugs into your editor and build tools, automatically adding getters, equals, logging, and more, so you never have to write them yourself."

The author argues that Java should stop trying to mimic the brevity of scripting languages, as this sacrifices consistency and introduces unnecessary abstraction layers.

Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)

In the software industry, the KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid—is repeatedly emphasized; for Java to survive, it must embrace simplicity.

Micro‑service architectures are now ubiquitous, encouraging the decomposition of monolithic codebases into simple, stateless functions that avoid complex state management and multithreading nightmares.

All services ultimately handle data formats like JSON or XML and pass them through message buses (e.g., Kafka); even in this simple setup, Java and Spring still cling to heavyweight constructs such as extensive bean injection, complex application contexts, and the memory‑hungry JVM.

The verdict: adopt KISS, strip away unnecessary ceremony, and let Java focus on its strengths.