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Add to SafariWhen comparing Dropwizard vs Spring MVC, the Slant community recommends Spring MVC for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Spring MVC is ranked 11th while Dropwizard is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose Spring MVC is:
The official documentation covers virtually everything. The official website also has a series of great tutorials in video and text formats. There are links to Github repositories for Spring sample applications and there are also a lot of third-party tutorials out there for the fact that Spring MVC is so widely used by many experienced developers.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Enhanced productivity and less timewasting
The application can be run and debugged from the IDE without the need to recompile or redeploy the WAR file. This is because a Dropwizard web application creates on main program which starts the jetty container.
Pro Application metrics integrated into the framework
Dropwizard comes with application metrics integrated out of the box. These metrics provide a lot of useful information such as request/response time.
For example, to get the execution time of a method, the @Timed annotation is used.
Pro Quick project bootstrap
Starting a project with Dropwizard si very easy and bootstraping is quick and painless. All that's needed is a single dependency added in the pom.xml file and it's ready to go.
Pro Great documentation that covers almost everything
The official documentation covers virtually everything. The official website also has a series of great tutorials in video and text formats. There are links to Github repositories for Spring sample applications and there are also a lot of third-party tutorials out there for the fact that Spring MVC is so widely used by many experienced developers.
Pro Spring MVC has a massive community
Being the oldest and most used JVM web framework, means that Spring MVC has a massive community of followers who are very helpful and have provided numerous tutorials and answers on SO.
Spring even holds an annual conference called SpringOne. The Spring forums and SO are great places to ask and get help about anything Spring related. The website blog and newsletter keep developers informed on every news related with the framework.
Pro Spring apps are highly scalable
Applications are meant to scale as the framework is used in large-scale applications worldwide. Components like EhCache are used to scale memory cache and it also contains components used for parallel processing.
Batch enables processing of large volumes of records and job processing statistics.
Pro Spring has an extensive ecosystem
It is based and is dependent on the Spring Framework, therefore it benefits from tools like for example Roo and Spring Tool Suite and many more tools included in the Spring Framework. All Maven dependencies are available in a public Maven repository.
There are also 3rd-party solutions for Spring, such as MyEclipse which includes scaffolding capability for Spring MVC.
Cons
Con Does not allow a lot a freedom of choice
Dropwizard removes a lot of freedom that the developer may have with other frameworks because of the fact that it tries to do everything itself. It chooses the best Java libraries for the job required, without allowing the developer much choice.
Con Updating and code maintenance can be a grueling task if you are a beginner
Updating your project is manageable if you’re already familiar with the framework and the project itself, but if you’re just diving in it can be a little overwhelming and hard.
Con Bloated legacy DI API
Spring DI is bloated and rather complex in comparison to CDI.
Con Complex and not newbie friendly
Spring MVC architecture although simple has a lot of layers and abstractions which can be hard to debug if problems arise. It is also highly dependant on the Spring core.
It's an old and mature framework that has numerous amount of ways to extend and configure it – and this actually makes it fairly complex.
Con Lacking in UI development
While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces.
Con Unnecessarily slow, bloated, complex, convoluted, wordy, and verbose
Spring is convoluted and XML-ridden. Deploying things on the JVM has always been a pain in the nipple and nothing has changed much since the 90s. All things Java-related are wordy, verbose, and a waste of developer time.
Con Slow Prototyping
If you are looking to build a quick prototype fast and easy, Spring isn't going to help much. It's very large and quite hard to grasp if you are just beginning with it.
