Spring and all the projects in the Spring family have changed the way we develop in Java. This has been even accelerated with the arrival of Spring Boot. Yet, the family is so wide that there is still much to learn and share about Spring.
In the past, we advised using the constructor to inject dependencies with Spring, and we introduced Lombok.
Guess what?
Those go quite well along together, except maybe for a little trick to known when you wish to use Spring’s @Value.
We’ll cover all that in this post.
If you’ve been using Spring for a while, or copy-pasting some web tutorials or examples, you’ve probably put some @Autowired annotations on private fields.
This does work, but it’s not the best way to do it.
I’ve discussed with several people, this year. Technical leads, technical supervisors, architects… You get the gist. Among those discussions, I heard a recurring complaint, which I previously feared to be my demanding nature expressing itself.
But no! Other people noticed it too, and it basically boils down to something like this: we’re facing a new generation of developers, who like to do things fast and don’t care much about how things work deep down, and we’re living in an era proposing a new framework to help them go faster and not understand. The two together won’t make for great developers. Good developers, maybe, but not great ones.
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