I got a moment of clarity today on why I am generally against things like maven and spring.

Our project used to be assembled using a massive Builder class. It was maybe a thousand lines long, certain methods had to be called before other methods, to make sure the relevant objects were created in a proper sequence, and it was hard to follow. Spring advocates asserted that this abomination would be solved by going the Spring route.

Around the same time, our build was becoming unmanageable. Specifically the number of dependencies was getting too large, and too complex to understand. We had jars shared across projects, and ran into divergent needs. Maven advocates asserted that this abomination would be solved by going the maven route.

Both situations have something in common. In the first, the Builder abomination was telling us “your app is too complex, split it up, or simplify it”. In the second, the awful build script with all the dependencies was saying the same thing – “your app is too complex, split it up, or simplify it”.

In both cases we experienced pain, we knew something was hurting. But rather than listen to the pain and try to understand what it was saying to us, we chose to medicate the pain away using tools.

Maven kinda seems to help with dependency management, with declarative and transitive dependencies, but now we have a 50MB WAR file. It contains libraries totally unrelated to what we are doing – like jfreechart and we chart nothing – that come in transitively and are never used. Few people on the team know this, or seem to care. Mentioning that we have such a fat app is met with a shoulder shrug. We prefer to keep away from the pain.

Similarly, now that we’re on Spring, there is no single horrible Builder class that you swear at every time you have to change it. Instead there are many smaller xml files, and autowiring and annotations that make the wire-up happen. The organisation has invested in an artefact repository with people looking after it etc. All these smaller parts and activities seem to feel less painful. But I think the sum of pain is at least the same, the complexity is at least the same. But it all has the seductive quality of being less in our face.

So as I sat there today for several minutes watching maven download jars, I realised I want the pain that its shielding me from back in my face. Don’t medicate me away from pain with these abstractions. In the human body pain is feedback calling attention to something that needs to be fixed. The wise response is to pay attention, not to medicate. So this is why I am against maven and spring and the like. They attempt to cover over things that I want direct contact with, things that I want to feel, things that give me feedback. If my app is hard to configure, I want the feedback. If my app is a 50MB war with a ton of dependencies, I want the feedback.

So I’d prefer to strip these things out and get more down to the metal. It would be painful, certainly, but I’d welcome that. The app would be the better for it.