What is the exact meaning of invasive? and what makes Spring non-invasive? [closed]

Answer 1

An invasive framework means that you are force to extend one of their classes or implement one of their interfaces. You can see that in frameworks like Struts or EJB2. Spring is not-invasive because avoids that. At worst, a class may be annotated with one of Spring's annotation, but it´s otherwise a POJO. So only you need a POJO like that:

package com.habuma.spring;
 public class HelloWorldBean {
  public String sayHello() {
return "Hello World";
 }
}

Answer 2

Invasive meaning - spreading very quickly all around. Spring author says frameworks like EJB, Struts etc are full of framework specific code which is hard to migrate to other frameworks which is against Java philosophy of write once and run anywhere. Spring says it noninvasive because it uses POJO to write server side so it can be migrated to any platform. But as suggested by at least 2 contributor it in this post, Spring is cancer contrary to what it claims

spring is a cancer to a project that once it has infected your project you can't do anything without hacking at spring config files ... non-invasive is pretty misleading on that front! – user177800 Mar 11 '13 at 7:18

Answer 3

Claiming that Spring is non-invasive is like claiming that the earth is flat. You completely deny reality based on nothing else than your personal bias.

Spring is not only invasive to your code base, it is also invasive to your brain. It will annoy the hell out of you when you have built a decent confidence in searching the web for information and solutions for your programming problems. I have done serious programming work in some 10 languages and shells, and almost always managed to find useful information, answers and hints to solve my problems. Usually I manage to find convergence towards a decent solution pretty fast, and sometimes after a bit of digging. Not so with Spring. A once popular scripting language touted the slogan "there's more than way to do it". For Spring, you will mostly find many ways how not to do it, or many ways that will not work in your particular setup.

I do not doubt that Spring has real value. I do see that. But it comes with way too much magic, that works well as long as it works, but once it fails, the tooling and documentation often fail as well.