When comparing Spring MVC vs FastAPI, the Slant community recommends FastAPI for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” FastAPI is ranked 4th while Spring MVC is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose FastAPI is:
It has a simple but powerful dependency injection system, it can be used to handle authentication, per-user rate limiting, authorization controls (e.g. with roles), etc.
Specs
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Pros
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.
Pro Dependency injection
It has a simple but powerful dependency injection system, it can be used to handle authentication, per-user rate limiting, authorization controls (e.g. with roles), etc.
Pro Standards
It is based on standards: OpenAPI, JSON Schema and OAuth 2.0.
Pro Data validation
It validates the data using the types you declared. Even in deeply nested JSON requests.
Pro High-performance
It's based on Starlette and Pydantic, so, it's one of the fastest Python frameworks.
Pro Editor completion
It is based on Python type declarations, so, editors and tools can give great support. Including type checks and autocompletion everywhere.
Pro One of the fastest growing communities
Pro Fast is really fast (!)
It's easy to develop API based applications in Python on deadlines for Android and IOS Development.
Pro Automatic docs
It generates interactive API documentation automatically from your code.
Pro Database independent
It's independent of database or ORM, but compatible with all of them. Including relational databases and NoSQL.
Pro Async IO / optional
It's based on Async IO, which gives it high concurrency. But you can use non-async libraries and it runs them appropriately.
Pro World class documentation
It has some of the best documentation of any framework.
Pro WebSockets
Because it's an async framework, it can handle async-native protocols like WebSockets.
Pro OAuth 2.0
It has integrated support for OAuth 2.0. Including declaring required scopes per endpoint. So, you can easily integrate it with external OAuth 2.0 providers or build your own with it.
Pro Background tasks
Included support for background tasks, thanks to being based on Starlette.
Pro Supports GraphQL
Python's graphene library is included as an optional dependency meaning that GraphQL API's are supported out of the box, with no additional tweaking needed.
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.
Con Smaller community
Since FastAPI is relatively new, its community is smaller than Django Rest Framework. But it can grow with time.