Rant: WTF Spring Boot!

Some people just can’t leave well enough alone, I swear! When last I left Spring Boot world everything was going great. The project bootstrapping was pretty straight forward. The documentation pretty much matched the actual behaviors. The actual behaviors were pretty well laid out. Today I tried to create a project from scratch. Between fighting Java version hell from the online generator, to fighting gradle dependency hell both there and in IntelliJ, to then wrestling with some new fucked up syntax for something as simple as reading in the configuration file I have wasted two hours and gotten absolutely fucking nowhere!

All I’m trying to do is make a simple little not complicated REST service to test the API. Two years ago, with whichever version of Spring Boot that was, it would have all “just worked” in a matter of minutes. No, it’s not a lack of familiarity on my part. No, it’s not that I had some “master” Spring Boot project that I carve up and reuse over and over. The whole chain just worked out of the box. They essentially broke the syntaxes that used to work. That’s fine, I get that sometimes you have to break some things to improve things. However none of their examples work correctly or show the behaviors. What’s worse is that their documentation is once again as fucking buried as it was back before the Spring Boot days. You can’t get a straight answer on versions and what not. That problem existed a couple years ago too. It’s really a train wreck over there.

So, fuck you Spring. Instead I’m going to give my shot at Ktor to see about getting something actually fast up and running in Kotlin. You apparently have decided to return to your ossified and overly convoluted roots of which you extracted yourself several years ago. Thanks for wasting two hours of my time this morning.