Spring-rs is a microservice framework in Rust inspired by Java's spring-boot

by holmofyHu • 2 years ago

74 84 2 years ago

John23832• 2 years ago

In my opinion this needs more examples. Currently I’m not sure why I would use this over Axum or ActixWeb.

jwalton• 2 years ago

Agreed. I’ve never used spring-boot, so telling me this is like spring-boot is less informative than the author might think it is.

ivan_gammel• 2 years ago

Java world is huge, so for Java developers who want to try Rust it makes perfect sense. It may bring more users than targeting developers who already use Rust.

netsharc• 2 years ago

Huh, the name collisions won't be confusing at all...

Here's hoping for a cease & desist of the use of the name, because I don't feel like having to filter through all the Rustian examples when I search for how to solve something in the actual Spring context.

nirvdrum• 2 years ago

For what it’s worth, I thought the same thing when Rails added a component called “Spring”. I thought it would lead to needless search conflicts since they’re both used for web development. But, it’s mostly been a non-issue.

chii2• 2 years ago

should've name it something like 'rusty-coil', and not name clash with spring!

ffsm8• 2 years ago

this new project, spring-rs is a wrapper for various other projects, gluing them together. (and thats totally fine!)

But naming it after the Spring Framework might be slightly exaggerating its ambition.

Even its homepage uses marketing thats not really on point for Spring i think?

i.e. Lightweight: The core code of spring-rs does not exceed 5,000 lines

I dont think anyone can honestly call Spring with its 8 million Lines of Java Code ... lightweight?

99_00• 2 years ago

Spring framework can be seen as a wrapper for other projects and technologies creating a cohesive development platform.

The_Colonel• 2 years ago

No, Spring Framework is a singular repository which serves as a core for the larger Spring ecosystem. But even the other projects like Spring Boot, Spring Data, Spring Security are centrally developed / coordinated.

karmakaze4• 2 years ago

This is like the renaming to JavaScript to ride the coattails of Java.

I suppose Spring is still a popular, widely known framework. Other than desired popularity, there's no resemblance and is antithetical. Anything I see associating with Spring, I would assume to be outdated and inefficient.

randmeerkat2• 2 years ago

I suppose Spring is still a popular, widely known framework. Other than desired popularity, there's no resemblance and is antithetical. Anything I see associating with Spring, I would assume to be outdated and inefficient.

Spring is a battle tested, robust, optimized framework, that has scaled the largest brands in the world. It is literally what fortune five hundred companies trust their fortunes with. Spring is far from being outdated or inefficient, and will likely continue to dominate the market for years if not decades to come.

trustno2• 2 years ago

To be honest, 8 million of java code lines is equivalent to like 50 thousand lines of code in other languages

devvvvvvv• 2 years ago

Compared with SpringBoot in java, spring-rs has higher performance and lower memory usage, allowing you to completely get rid of the bloated JVM and travel light.

My HelloWorld program also has higher performance and lower memory usage than SpringBoot. Rust moment.

29athrowaway• 2 years ago

Java and Spring = an effort multiplier. It makes you spend more effort to obtain the same you would with other tech stacks.

Massive amounts of boilerplate and slow build times.

There are better ideas out there.

lopatamd• 2 years ago

Hmm actually it's very intuitive with latest versions. Maybe you're stuck on the old ones where they used to use XML still lol

KronisLV• 2 years ago

Spring Boot is indeed quite usable! I'd compare it to something like modern ASP.NET, good runtime performance, okay ecosystem, good tooling, okay languages.

The old Spring, not so much - I've never had a bare Spring project that was pleasant to work with, especially when you don't have embedded Tomcat and the application server is configured separately from the deployable .war or whatever, what a mess. Thankfully, you can put those legacy projects into containers and make things slightly more palatable.

That said, even Spring Boot can feel a bit much sometimes, something like Dropwizard is still very idiomatic as far as the Java ecosystem is concerned and is both stable and usable in those cases: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/stable/ (not as fancy as Vert.X or Quarkus or whatever, but it's been around for a while and is decently documented)

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

Spring is for when doing projects with teams of several digits team size, with offshoring and several consulting agencies.

Don't use it when WordPress does the job.

nurettin2• 2 years ago

Why even use spring when you have spring boot which lets you get up and running with an orm and automatic migrations under 100 loc?

signal118• 2 years ago

Spring is for when doing projects with teams of several digits team size, with offshoring and several consulting agencies.

It’s a better fit for smaller teams, especially with temp staff joining and leaving frequently, so the fact that you can hire Spring skills on the street becomes helpful.

“Several digit team sizes” have different needs, but larger teams often are polyglot + microservices based, and Spring adds less value there.

ldjkfkdsjnv• 2 years ago

Spring is for large scale industrial systems that run critical business applications. Its for hundreds of developers building complicated software

coding123• 2 years ago

developers building complicated software

That's why I left Java and joined other large orgs with hundreds of developers that build simple software.

tormeh• 2 years ago

Don't write Rust like it's Java: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41198358

jfoudfwfayasd• 2 years ago

What is great about Rust and Go is that you don't need frameworks. Let's keep it that way.

maxbond• 2 years ago

I mean, they're both excellent languages, but people regularly use frameworks for both (eg Axum for Rust and Fiber for Go), and in Rust you get the excitement of choosing an async runtime. They both have important advantages but this isn't one of them.

nurettin2• 2 years ago

spring-job(integrated with tokio-cron-scheduler)

Does this work well with cpu-bound tasks?

nawgz• 2 years ago

Spring sucks. Decorator magic non-debuggable garbage that chokes under performance limits with inscrutable error message misattributing overflows with the location it overflowed at.

Wouldn’t touch this project with a ten foot pole despite it not matching spring in any meaningful sense.

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

Because debugging Rust macros is soooo much better.

lnxg33k1• 2 years ago

It’s going to be awesome to look for help about it on search engines, in case of issues

npstr4• 2 years ago

I can see a lot of hate in the comments about the original Spring Project / Java language. You are absolutely right, it's the worst. Please go away, nothing to see there =)

On a different note though, when I was a Junior, building my first few projects, I didn't get it either. You'll get it when you make it to true Senior level :) Just last year I took over a project at work where 2-4 engineers (including "Senior"s, especially the one who came up with the infrastructure) were very busy reinventing their own framework/platform instead of building the actual product, for about 3 years. They had their own protocols and their own transaction management and two webservers (cause they were trying to use VertX websockets in addition to HTTP but due to a skill issue couldn't serve them from a single webserver) etc etc. What they did not have, was a working product. I got buy-in from management up to C level to rewrite that burning garbage dump. Now, about a year later, after management moved those people off and me in, the product is actually live with all the missing features, has about 50% less LoC than at its peak, and does no longer exist as a distributed stateful microservice agglomeration. Instead it's a Spring Boot monolith. Including Spring Security. It was the first time any of my software got a security bug found by external researchers and only because I did not add Spring Security immediately along Spring Boot because I thought we can go along with the homegrown auth code for a while longer.

Anyways, serious people who have built some serious (web) products will appreciate the battle proven tech that has integrations with just about any other relevant software on the planet and implements production ready patterns for you to immediately use.

If you don't, may I suggest you ask yourself: maybe you've just been building only toy projects, or solving too much leet code problems? Maybe you've only worked on projects meant for your resume or promotion dossier, rather than actually putting a product live to millions of users?

I applaud the Rust ecosystem taking one of the best pages from the Java ecosystem book, although the focus on "lightweight" does not make me optimistic that the author has truly understood what value, and how, Spring delivers.

tonyarkles3• 2 years ago

Heh, my personal complaint about Spring comes from the other side of this. I came into a company where Spring Boot was already deeply entrenched, in a Senior DevOps/Sysadmin type of role. I spent a significant amount of time untangling all of the voodoo reflection magic that the teams who had created the services couldn't seem to debug on their own.

To be fair to Spring Boot, the developers in question didn't have any real operations mentality, which complicated things. A service would crash/500 and would have a 0-byte log file documenting everything that led to the crash. It was pretty surpassing though to discover that a lot of the visibility things I'd come to expect from the large variety of other non-Java frameworks didn't seem to be included by default (eg request logging/exception logging) and had to be turned on explicitly.

re-thc3• 2 years ago

Heh, my personal complaint about Spring comes from the other side of this.

What did your example have to do with Spring? It sounds like it'd have been the same if replaced with something else. It was the developers...

godelshalt• 2 years ago

Sounds like you ran into a bad "not invented here" culture, which can seriously slow down a product. Even worse, they are often so passionate about the tech that they can scare management into agreement with their priorities. Kudos to you for having the backbone to stand up and fix it!! Also: I am no fan of Spring ;) -- I just have ptsd from the early xml config days. If it were already in place though, I'd roll with it.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

that team is probably telling a story how someone convinced management to ditch their best in class product which would conquer market share, with a lame cookie cutter version that didn't even validate jwt tokens or something at launch and now they're one of the bottom also-run in the market.

npstr4• 2 years ago

Hehe, the original pitch for this project contained lots of mentions of AI =)

unscaled• 2 years ago

Nobody here was saying you should always write your own framework, which is what your engineers were trying to do. Vert.x is a a low-level framework when compared to Spring, so it doesn't provide much organization for your code. This is betrayed by the fact that there are higher-level frameworks written on top of Vert.x, like Quarkus.

What you are describing above is a skill issue. If the developers are bad, they'll be bad with any framework. As a proof, I can give you dozens of bloated, slow, buggy and hard to maintain Spring projects I've seen during my career. I can also list a bunch of successful projects we've built with Vert.x and a custom framework. At the same time, we also have a bunch of successful Spring projects. This has more to do with the skills of the team involved rather than the framework selection.

But when it comes to selecting your framework, there are good reasons we avoid Spring. Spring shines when it comes to having a bunch of built-in modules for everything: authentication, configuration, dependency injection, monitoring, various template engines and databases - whatever you want. The advantage is that you don't need to spend time investigating and arguing dependencies - they're all right there. It's also easy to structure your projects and to hire developers who claim to know Spring (whether they actually do understand how Spring works is another story).

But Spring has a lot of issues too:

- Performance: This is the main reason we avoid it for most projects. Spring is slow. This appears to be the main reason OP has created a Rust version of the Spring framework. Of course, Rust has less overhead than Java, but there are many Java frameworks that are faster than Spring. Spring is just proudly underoptimized. Almost anything else I could say about Spring or you could say about other frameworks may be subjective or anecdotal — but speed is easy to quantify. If you look at the TechEmpower benchmarks, there is an order of magnitude of difference between Spring and lightweight frameworks like Vert.x and Jooby and even some optimized heavyweight frameworks like Quarkus[1]. If you care about performance you just cannot use Spring.

- Inscrutable Magic: Spring has a lot of annotation-based magic. A lot of Spring enthusiasts like it, since it gets stuff done and reduces boilerplate. But it also makes your framework behavior hard to understand and scrutinize. If you want to know what an annotation does, you can't just click "go to definition" in your editor and look at its source code. You need to find out where all the possible annotation processors are and then read all the relevant code until you find how that particular annotation is processed into generated code or wrapper classes or whatever.

- Security: I beg to differ here. Spring Security can save you from the bugs that you would have if you wrote your own authentication code, but the code that Spring itself brings to the table does not have a very good track record. The sheer amount of CVEs found in Spring[2] is staggering. A lot of is due to popularity and exposure, but this is also due to Spring's desire to include everything under the sun and do as much as possible behind the scenes, with automagic. A great example of this approach is how Spring Actuator used to expose a lot of sensitive endpoints (including a full heapdump endpoint) by default, on a standard path. This needed you to add the actuator module, but a lot of servers included it because this is the standard way to enable health checks in Spring, and almost every cloud infrastructure nowadays requires health checks. The end result is that if you wanted your Spring Boot 1.5 web server to be secure, you'd had to explicitly disable these endpoints[3]. Even with modern Spring versions, the sensitive "/actuator/info" endpoint is still exposed by default.

[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...

[2] https://spring.io/security

[3] https://docs.stackhawk.com/vulnerabilities/40042/

chii2• 2 years ago

Inscrutable Magic ... need to find out where all the possible annotation processors are

or you read the documentation.

signal118• 2 years ago

Spring’s security record prior to 6 was pretty interesting. They had a bunch of RCE causing vulns they wouldn’t even recognise as vulns (eg due to Java deserialisation issues), which wasn’t a great look for something in use in many large companies.

To be fair, Spring devs did say “don’t use it like that”, but devs of all skill levels use Spring, so that’s not great advice.

It is much better now, but of course the latest thing is that it’s now owned by Broadcom. So if you as a contractor are foisting Spring upon your clients, I hope you’re ready with a security/fixes strategy, because don’t expect Broadcom to support old versions of Spring forever. Or else you could just pay Broadcom $$$.

Good time to mention: users of open source Spring 5, it goes end of life this month. Hope you’re ready!

npstr4• 2 years ago

The performance argument I cannot subscribe to. We did extensive load testing in the past on different products, and the bottleneck in the end was always the DB (or more recently, getting screwed by OpenSSL v3). Sure Spring might not be the fastest in its class, but it's a cheap problem to solve, just fire up more or bigger VMs (as long as you've kept it stateless).

The security concerns about actuator I cannot subscribe to either. Why are your endpoints exposed to the outside by default? Why is the management port reachable from the outside? Why are devs not reading the docs and only enabling the endpoints they need?

The magic annotations part can definitely be a problem. Would recommend to stay away as much as possible and keep that simple. Only use it as a last resort, but boy can it be powerful. Need your own request scope that is bound to transactional commit/rollback? You can have that to for example only send out side effects when the transaction succeeds, or to build transparent caching solutions on request scope.

dzonga• 2 years ago

I think you're leaving something out.

- the affinity for 'traditional' java guys to make code seem so complicated and be wrapped in so many layers.

the JVM is an excellent platform bar none. But if you work on a java codebase with the traditional guys - I feel sorry for you. there has to be so many "best practices" - Impl, Factory, Wrapper what what . what was supposed to be a simple endpoint - then a simple function for business logic is now wrapped in 5 or so classes.

then you add the magic of "Spring" and productivity & everything else slows down to molasses.

End of day if you're working on web services or internet stuff - you take in JSON, transform JSON, spit out JSON. That's been my experience. & that's not complicated to do. maybe other people can differ.

olavgg• 2 years ago

Great comment! I been developing web applications for almost 20 years. I've been working on several frameworks within PHP, Python, Ruby, Elixir and Java.

And after all these years I have settled on Spring Boot. Because it is mature, stable, fast and well documented. There are other frameworks that claims they are faster, but I've spent 10x more time just getting my stuff to work. I really do not have time for that as my focus is delivering business value. One Spring monolith scales really well on a Epyc server.

signal118• 2 years ago

You'll get it when you make it to true Senior level :)

This and the following lines have so many opinions presented as truisms, it’s difficult to take the poster seriously.

2-4 “senior” devs were spending time on tech-only features without delivering actual end-user / business features. Ookay. Seems like a failure of engineering management, but let’s press forward.

2-4 engineers replaced with 1 “true Senior” engineer, who rewrote the microservices nightmare into a monolith powered by Spring. And he had C Suite backing for this. All’s well now.

I mean, that’s a great result. But it feels like there’s also some great people/motivation backstory we’re not getting. Also, maybe lessons from a one-person monolith don’t apply everywhere, even if that monolith serves millions of users?

npstr4• 2 years ago

You don't have to take me serious to derive value from the post. It's obvious anecdotal, just shares a story. I skipped some of the details to focus on the topic of Spring. But I think I can add some as you have rightly spotted they are missing: The major problem was imho indeed engineering management of that specific team, which was also swapped out at the same time I was put on the team (which was before we got the buy in to rewrite it). There were actually at least two dev generations of the team building the software before ours. The first one caused the most damage by the demented infrastructure decisions, while the second iteration was not able to successfully challenge that, even though they had the right ideas already. New engineering management was awesome in that they supported devs with most of our radical ideas, but also pulled in resources from other departments to help deal with the largest pain points such as adding Spring Boot quite early in the mending journey, with the heavy lifting being done by an expert from another team temporarily joining us.

Forgive my judgy wordings in the direction of seniority...our org has (had?) an issue where complexity is rewarded over simplicity. Some senior people here all they could do is build something so clusterfucked noone can understand it. Funnily enough, this project was originally launched to replace a legacy system noone was able to (or unwilling to) maintain.

pylua2• 2 years ago

I don’t get all the spring hate here. Spring is a great framework, and the sheer developer mass means it’s easy to hire developers that can quickly be onboarded. It’s definitely opinionated, but a lot of the opinions are correct.

I think that rust is missing something like the above, and the attempt is appreciated by me.

re-thc3• 2 years ago

I don’t get all the spring hate here.

It's popular to hate on Java. It's become a sad trend.

The funny thing is most people that hate it go on to re-invent or use something vastly similar eventually (even if they don't see it that way).

Spring does it for you right at the start. People hate to read the documentation or understand how things (including how Java) works and just blame it.

tdb7893• 2 years ago

It's a 29 year old language. It has done an amazing job adapting over time and is a technical marvel (and I still think it is a better than average language overall) but there are tons of valid criticisms of it and I don't begrudge someone not loving the language.

signal118• 2 years ago

It’s not about Java hate.

Historical context: Spring was a lightweight alternative to J2EE. It started and became popular in financial services because no one wanted the boilerplate hell that was J2EE.

By your logic we should all have stuck to J2EE as that was what the vendor (Sun) was pushing.

Today Spring has become the new J2EE. It’s no longer lightweight. It has a gravitational field at this point. (Except less boilerplate than J2EE because the Spring devs cared about dev ex more than J2EE’s creators did.)

Like J2EE back then, today, once you step out of the “framework == language” mentality, you’ll see there’s a bunch of ways to achieve what Spring does for you. Often with less code, less magic, and faster.

This is not to say Spring is always bad. Use it if it makes sense — for some small teams it may make a lot of sense. But don’t sleepwalk into it because “Java means Spring.” It doesn’t.

written-beyond• 2 years ago

There literally like 1 straight up bigot-yish opinion but that too gives an explanation.

I will show you true spring hate. During my second summer in college I had a PM recommend me some stuff to try so I could maybe contribute free labour to their organisation. This very unenthusiastic person told me to first learn "spring", I said ofc I will learn some spring and get back to you in a 1-2 weeks.

Context, I had already written many small PoC apps in Rust using Rocket, Diesel and Postgres, I was naïve but not completely inexperienced in the Rest/we server space.

Every tutoria for spring that I'd find would first want you to setup the Spring IDE because it's very difficult to learn and work without. The IDE is super simple and should be a breeze to setup and start working. I had recently paused by distro hopping on PopOS! so I started so I followed the Spring IDE installation for Linux.

I spent 2 weeks trying to install Spring. I reinstalled by OS multiple times because I was very inexperienced in Linux and would be paranoid that I had broken something in Linux (which I frequently did before). 2 weeks of debugging the Spring the IDE installation ended with me finding out that the certificate for the java installation I had installed through the PM was invalid or expired, someone had pushed a broken package, which was preventing springs ide from verifying any of the sources it would need to download and install packages from. You needed to download the official tar from javas website and change the certificate from there. Everything worked and I had spring setup after 2 weeks of tinkering.

I gave up on learning spring after that, for atleast till my graduation I did not formally every work with Java because of the unhealthy reliance on editor integrations for newbies. Those 2 weeks had traumatized me, they were most probably my fault. I could had switched OS's been windows to make it easier, you could think of many solutions. But the fact that I was able to learn and work with pre-async rust did not give me much confidence in the Java ecosystem.

I am wiser now and understand the utility of Spring, but it's heavy reliance on IDE features I still do not appreciate.

dxxvi• 2 years ago

First, I never use Spring IDE (which is nothing but Eclipse + some plguins). I use IntelliJ ultimate version which supports Spring pretty well. I wonder why you had to re-install the OS when you mess up the IDE, esp. in Linux. In Linux, Spring IDE, IntelliJ, jdk ... are zipped files. You download them, unzip them in your home directory. If you think everything is messed up and you want to restart from scratch, create a new account in you Linux machine and start again. Second, you can write a Spring-based app without a Spring-support IDE (e.g. IntelliJ community edition doesn't support Spring, i.e. it doesn't understand any Spring feature but of course, it understands Java). Many places where I worked were too cheap to buy the InterlliJ licenses for us and we were still fine (although we weer not happy at all).

nextaccountic• 2 years ago

Okay, something interesting about this is that you don't need to mount routes but has the option to apply them as is. It may help cut down boilerplate.

(Not sure if the underlying Axum also has this feature)

exabrial• 2 years ago

I'm waiting for Rust to get a Dependency Injection framework, on par with CDI (I don't care much for Spring).

weinzierl3• 2 years ago

A big part of Spring is dependency injection and I wonder what people's opinion on it are nowadays - in general and in Rust specifically.

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

I don't see why an ecosystem full of macro magic and traits, should have anything against it.

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

I love the irony of hating magic frameworks like Spring, while cheering for crates full of macro magic like serde.

lionkor• 2 years ago

serde is mostly pretty simple, no?

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

There is a Rust Nation talk one hour long about how serde macros work.

That is how simple it is.

weinzierl3• 2 years ago

I always thought, if there is a contender for becoming Rust's Spring (in a good sense) it would be Pavex.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34195291

trolleski• 2 years ago

Don't Java my Rust, please... Nor Go for that matter... ;) on a more serious note, we should try of different stuff and adopt what works, not sure Spring approach is worth pasting to Rust.

Spring-rs is a microservice framework in Rust inspired by Java's spring-boot

Related Stories