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Spring
Raised as a usability problem by 24 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 22 threads.
People raised many different problems with Spring, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 24 complaints
- Error messages get buried in thousands of log lines, hard to find2026-02-25
- Developers find WebFlux hard to use, with convoluted pattern-on-top-of-pattern tooling2025-06-05
- Spring IDE installation on Linux failed for weeks due to a broken certificate2024-08-18
- Docs skip details, so users waste time rolling their own solutions2023-08-17
- Hard to write complex analytic queries; JPA query language cannot express them2023-08-16
- Hard to find the right documentation across many sub-projects2023-05-07
- Poor documentation and renamed file extension cost hours; login page hard to get working2023-02-15
- Javadoc has placeholder entries and lacks overviews, so users miss existing capabilities2022-09-10
- Annotation-driven code is hard to debug with breakpoints and hard to customize2022-08-10
- Poor defaults lead developers to ship without pooling or timeouts, causing production problems2022-05-05
- Configuration is fiddly and tedious, slightly off-putting to set up2022-01-04
- Docs list things the reader already knows and don't explain how to interpret a Spring project2021-10-20
- Opaque magic: incantations must be right, but the underlying behavior is unknown and hidden2021-04-16
- Setting up the OAuth client is complicated and getting configuration right takes too long2021-03-17
- Impossible to know what gets instantiated; configuration is extremely hard to inject and configure2021-03-17
- Debugging means digging through XML layers to find where logs are written2021-01-17
- Annotation processing code is hidden, so hard to find and debug2018-04-02
- Spring processes keep running, so the developer must manually kill them with an alias2018-03-21
- Configuring the CSV header-row option takes more XML than writing a parser from scratch2017-06-23
- Error messages are unhelpful when bean configuration XML has problems2016-08-07
- Hard to find which XML file and setting to change2015-12-19
- Vague error messages and many abstraction layers make problems hard to diagnose when injection fails2015-09-13
- Frameworks are atrocious, full of needless abstraction layers like FactoryFactories2015-06-06
- Writing Spring config files from scratch is a horrific process2012-11-03