I Need Help Making a Choice Between Two Options: 1) Learn a Complicated Framework to Cover One Complex Task it Covers, 2) Try to Roll My Own.

1    21 Jul 2015 10:46 by u/jrsofty

Partially this is a code reuse issue as well. We have a product where the original developer (who is no longer here) used Spring and there is a portion of the product we want to re-purpose for another product. This portion uses the Spring Evaluation Language which from what I can tell is not a simple thing to recreate. My biggest problem is that I've not learned the Spring Framework, and the time that I attempted to teach myself how it works, I got so confuse I just stopped (could have been the book I was using I don't know). So the question I have is which would be easier to once again dive into trying to learn Spring, or just try to work around Spring and come up with my own solution?

3 comments

1 u/OTL_ 21 Jul 2015 11:00

That completely depends on the functionality of this re-purposed portion. Is there even a way to work around it without using SpEL? Also, can you reproduce the functionality even if you don't understand what the program is doing? You can do both but it may be worth assessing what is possible given your time frame.

1 u/Master_Foo 21 Jul 2015 11:07

Reasons to "Roll your own":

  1. You want control of the framework's IP.

  2. A sufficient framework does not exist in your target language.

  3. You want a better understanding of engines.

  4. The available framework costs money to licence. (And you don't want to pay)

Reasons not to "Roll your own":

  1. It's faster to learn an already available framework.

  2. You will probably have a framework with a lot of unknown bugs without a large community which uses it and reports bugs.

  3. You can hire professionals who already know a popular framework.

  4. When the next guy comes along he's going to have to learn a new obscure framework when it's probably better to just have him learn an existing framework with better documentation and community support.

0 u/jrsofty [OP] 21 Jul 2015 20:11

Thanks for the comments guys. It made me think through exactly what needs to be done and how we need to move forward. So I've requested a training on the Spring framework from my boss. He doesn't seem put off by the idea.