What is your view on frameworks like Spring that reduces....

[arulk pillai]

What is your view on frameworks like Spring that reduce the amount of code and promote best practices and consistent approach to development?

Another typical example would be using Apache's commons code (e.g StringUtils, MapUtils, EqualBuilder, HashcodeBuilder, BeanComparator, Validate, etc) as opposed to reinventing the wheel.
[ September 24, 2008: Message edited by: arulk pillai ]

[Alaa Nassef]

I believe that spring (and the like) promote cleaner code a little in a way where you reduce the amount of code you write, but even with it, you can do a lot of bad things, like non descriptive names, really long methods, huge number of arguments given to one method, bad formatting, etc.

Spring promotes best practices in the architecture sense (which helps a little with cleaner code), but not in the coding style sense

[Ilja Preuss]

Personally, I use Jakarta Commons a lot. It's typically high quality. In fact I think that many of the things they do should actually be part of the original Java API - and you wouldn't write your own LinkedList either, would you?

[arulk pillai]

Originally posted by Ilja Preuss:
Personally, I use Jakarta Commons a lot. It's typically high quality. In fact I think that many of the things they do should actually be part of the original Java API - and you wouldn't write your own LinkedList either, would you?

Couldn't agree more.

[Jeff Langr]

Originally posted by arulk pillai:
What is your view on frameworks like Spring that reduce the amount of code and promote best practices and consistent approach to development

I don't think you can say much against such frameworks. Still, the best thing is always to ensure that you do not have pervasive dependencies on them. A good thing to always ask is, "if we needed to replace this framework, how much work would it be? Could we do so in a single iteration?"

I remember a lot of work for people who sprinkled dependencies on classes from java.sql, when they wanted to change over to Hibernate.

Jeff
[ September 25, 2008: Message edited by: Jeff Langr ]

[Alaa Nassef]

I totally agree with Jeff on that