# Spring Framework

41 Hacker News commenters recommended Spring Framework and 56 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Mature Java framework that handles dependency wiring, with a long track record and wide integrations. Critics say its heavy magic, slow startup and accumulated baggage add complexity.

## Why people recommend it

- Well tested and stable (3 comments): "we are based on Spring, which is probably the most tested piece of software before new versions of Java are released" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713153)) "solid, battle-tested, enterprise-grade frameworks like Spring and Quarkus" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50140150)) "one of the more stable frameworks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47429045))
- Many integrations and wide adoption (2 comments): "Laravel, Django, Rails, and Spring each have thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of times more websites in production" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590312)) "Spring is well used and has many integrations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47475889))
- Handles wiring and dependency injection (3 comments): "I like using Spring as a Factory Factory Factory to build systems by snapping parts together" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113426)) "Spring for example is a fully managed way of talking about stuff in your app" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45854689)) "Never had a problem with ctor injection in Spring." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45839170))
- Simple and easy to reason about (3 comments): "Mostly just boils down to a Chain-of-Responsibility pattern which is incredibly easy to reason about." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580013)) "Agreed, Spring Framework is quite simple" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579524)) "it becomes quite easy to reason about" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576750))

## What people warn about

- Slow startup and runtime overhead (3 comments): "may provide up to twice the RPS as the Spring (Java) stack (externally discovered: at lower CPU and much lower RAM usage)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505736)) "Spring has ultimately been the source of performance issues for us with the solution being to ditch spring" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575305)) "Spring is slow because it scans the classpath, uses reflection and generates proxy classes all at startup." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50140263))
- Heavy magic hides bean definitions (3 comments): "The hard part is knowing where beans are defined, because Spring doesn't make that easy at all." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132637)) "it doesn't let me look into and understand the internals easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576338)) "with its heavy "magic" component" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527176))
- Accumulated baggage and dated patterns (2 comments): "it has accumulated so much baggage and relies on and perpetuates so many patterns that simply don't make sense anymore" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47578561)) "the training data still contains a large amount of Spring XML/AbstractBeanFactoryAware-style patterns" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176795))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ruby on Rails](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ruby-on-rails.md): 337 recommend
- [Django](https://hackerapproved.com/p/django.md): 277 recommend
- [Next.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/next-js.md): 127 recommend
- [Phoenix Framework](https://hackerapproved.com/p/phoenix.md): 85 recommend
- [Laravel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/laravel.md): 71 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Spring Framework", https://hackerapproved.com/p/spring-framework/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).