Last week, I wrote on how to migrate an existing Spring Boot application with a functional approach toward configuration. Since then, I got interesting feedback, and I had a presentation on that subject at Rockstar Night in Kiev, which made me think further. Here’s how I would refine my previous code.

In the latest years, there has been some push-back against frameworks, and more specifically annotations: some call it magic, and claim it’s hard to understand the flow of the application. It’s IMHO part of a developer’s job to know about some main frameworks. But it’s hard to argue in favor of annotations when there are more annotations than actual code.

In Android, every tutorial teaching you the basics describe how to design screen through XML files. It’s also possible to achieve the same result with Java (or any JVM-based language). Android screen design is not the only domain where XML and Java are valid options. For example, Spring configuration and Vaadin screen design allow both.