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Let’s Develop an E-Commerce Application from Scratch Using Java and Spring

Nil Madhab on October 29, 2021

Project setup, develop category and product APIs Motivation In my opinion, the best way to learn programming is to create a r...

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Dave • Oct 29 '21

Excellent article, with good diagrams.

A question though: What are your thoughts on Lombok (for removing the getters/setters and some boilerplate)?

Also, obviously for a Production system, you might want to tweak things a little (eg, ControllerAdvice for the edge cases when the DB is offline etc, maybe add CircuitBreaker, etc)... but I do understand that the aim of the code was a tutorial, not a Production Ready application.

Nil Madhab • Oct 29 '21

Lombok can be used. But for big projects it cause some issues. For demo projects it should be fine.

Yeah, it is a complete app. We can do many things to make it better. You are welcome to send a pull request.

Dave • Oct 29 '21

We actively use Lombok, across ~50 projects that are all in Production environments.

I'm curious, what problems have you seen with it on "big projects" ?

Nil Madhab • Oct 29 '21

levelup.gitconnected.com/be-carefu...

Dave • Oct 29 '21

Thanks, though I asked for your thoughts on it, not someone else's musing on the topic.

To address those points on that external site:

"It's another dependency" - yes, it is, yes, I have to modify the IDE too. But does it follow that I shouldn't deploy into Kubernetes because I have to install kubectl?
"Enourmous coupling, use interfaces instead" - this is more about where Lombok is used, and is a choice of how the workman uses the tool. I wouldn't use a sledgehammer to replace a window in my house.
"Removal of getters and setters hides code" - sure it does. But that doesn't mask anything, and by extension of the "hiding code is bad" argument, surely, no-one should use Spring either!
"Builder hides problems that would be a compile failure" - see javax validation. Your problems just went away.
"Lombok doesn't work with Spring variable injection" - cool, I've never seen a valid use case of having getters/setters in Spring config classes, why would anyone want equals() and hashCode()? Surely the answer is simply "don't use the tool where it's of no benefit!"

So, I ask again, what problems have you (or others) seen with Lombok in big projects?

Please note, I have no vested interest in, or affiliation with, Lombok.

Nil Madhab • Oct 29 '21

To answer your question, no personally I have never faced the issue. My team leads are against it, so we didn't implement it with lombok.

Nil Madhab • Oct 30 '21

We will build the frontend using vue. Stay tuned. You can check it out javascript.plainenglish.io/lets-de...

Dave • Oct 30 '21

I won't lie, I came to the post because I'm experienced enough in Spring etc, but was curious about the use of Vue. I was a little disappointed but to see any, but it was a long post.

I also dislike external links.

Still a decent article though.