Comment by jiehong
5 days ago
Quarkus is better, but isn’t that amazing IMO.
It’s still very much an annotation festival in the code, making the framework quite lengthy to learn for newcomers (gotta learn Java and the whole quarkus annotation DSL with it).
Go is verbose, but it is much more explicit and only uses standard language things instead of a whole annotation DSL.
Helidon SE (https://helidon.io/#se) or Javalin (https://javalin.io/) would be more in that vein - straight-forward modern Java, super fast.
In my opinion Helidon is the most refreshing of these frameworks. It supports virtual threads from the ground up and comes with clean, function, mostly annotation free APIs. It really looks like a Java framework should look today.
There are non-DSL frameworks in Java. It's just that arguably the benefits of a DSL outweigh learning them.
Putting an annotation on a method is much easier than registering this method at n places in ordinary code, which could look any number of ways. If you move to a new project, in the first case can just immediately jump into framework-related stuff, while in the second all this logic has to be untangled first. And let's be honest, Spring/Quarkus probably got their abstraction right after n iterations, which is not necessarily true of a random team.