Go is a fine language for infrastructure tooling. But for the 90% of software that is business applications, Spring Boot’s developer experience is dramatically superior – and AI-assisted development has eliminated the last argument against Java’s annotation-driven model.
Oracle ATG Commerce is legacy now, but its Nucleus component model, immutable repository items, and config layering were ahead of their time. Its distributed locking, custom messaging, and datasource switching were not. A reflection on what held up and what didn’t.
HAProxy sidecars for mTLS. Hystrix for circuit breaking. Apache Camel between layers within the same service. Six API versions. A mandated common framework. A squash merge ban. Each decision was defensible. Combined, they created a system that took three months to onboard into.
SAP Commerce OCC promises a stateless REST API for headless commerce. Underneath, every request hydrates an HTTP session and routes through the same stateful facades built for the JSP storefront. The API is stateless in contract but stateful in implementation.
The SAP Commerce Converter/Populator pattern optimized for extensibility at the cost of predictability. Deep chaining, invisible runtime graphs, and JVM heap exhaustion are the consequences.
Hybris gave engineers a beautifully simple API – modelService.create(), modelService.save(), modelService.remove(). Underneath, it fired hundreds of invisible queries, consumed unbounded memory, made bulk operations impossibly slow, and refused to let you delete data. This is why people are scared of ORMs.
Using Playwright for backend API testing in a Spring Boot repo is not reuse – it’s dual-stack maintenance. The right tool depends on what you’re verifying, not what you already have installed.