Here’s the Deal

Spring MVC vs FeathersJS

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When comparing Spring MVC vs FeathersJS, 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 FeathersJS is ranked 35th. 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.

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Common Questions

What are the best backend web frameworks?

Pros

Pro
Great documentation that covers almost everything

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.

Pro
Can sync events between different Node instances

Feather can sync events happening in two different Node processes or even servers in real-time. For example: an event happens in server A, the user connected to server B is instantly notified of that event.

This is done through a central Redis or Mongo collection or through a websocket libraries' clustering library.

Pro
Easy REST APIs

Through services, Feathers provides instant CRUD functionality, it also can easily expose a RESTful and real-time API through HTTP/HTTPS and websockets.

Pro
Can be integrated in an existing ExpressJS project

Since Feathers itself is built on top of Express (it's a thin wrapper over socket.io, primus and Express) and because of Feathers' highly modular nature, it's very easy to integrate Feathers in an existing Express project.

Pro
Plug-in any feature you need

Feathers makes extensive use of modules (which are called Feathers services). These services work like ExpressJS middleware and can be used with app.use('/path', serviceObject).

Services help developers keep their applications modular and as minimal as possible, without any unnecessary libraries or bloat.

Pro
Support for different socket transports

FeatherJS uses primus which is a universal wrapper for real-time frameworks. Through primus you can easily choose which socket transport you want to use.

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Cons

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.