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Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy (wedistribute.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
308 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy's Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.

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[–] 137 points 2 years ago (68 children)

Too bad it's java

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  • [+] 83 points 2 years ago (5 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I just self host and avoid Java like the plague due to how annoying it is to manage

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What's annoying about it? Deploying a war to tomcat is one of the easiest things one can do.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    If you are a Java shop, and you do tomcat, then cool, maybe you've worked out the mysteries if Java deployment and managing resources (ahem, memory), and upgrades etc over the life cycle of a project. But most people doing deployment don't want a one off Java app as a snowflake in their intra, if they can help it because it requires more buy into the ecosystem than you want

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  • [–] 73 points 2 years ago (30 children)

    Browsing the code makes me angry at how bloated Java projects are:

    package com.sublinks.sublinksapi.community.repositories;

import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.community.dto.Community;
import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.community.models.CommunitySearchCriteria;
import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.post.dto.Post;
import com.sublinks.sublinksapi.post.models.PostSearchCriteria;
import org.springframework.data.domain.Page;
import org.springframework.data.domain.Pageable;
import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository;
import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.Query;
import org.springframework.data.repository.query.Param;
import java.util.List;

public interface CommunitySearchRepository {

  List<Community> allCommunitiesBySearchCriteria(CommunitySearchCriteria communitySearchCriteria);

}

    Every file is 8 directories deep, has 20 imports, and one SQL statement embedded in a string literal. 😭

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Most IDEs will handle the imports for you and auto collapse them

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it better

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    How would you do "better" imports then?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    *Vaguely wave arms towards the few dozens languages that do imports right*

    I don’t mind Java personally, but let’s not pretend that its import syntax and semantics is at the better side of the spectrum here.

    Just look at… Go, Haskell, TypeScript, Rust, even D has a better module system.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Isn't Go just the equivalent of only doing asterisk-imports in Java, just without (and fair enough, Java has 0 need to do that 😂) repeating the import-keyword?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    There are multiple things in Go that make it better.

    But just for giving a few thoughts about Java itself;

    • being able to import a package and use it as a namespace would already go a long way
    • being able to import multiple things from a package without listing separate line for each items
    • not having to go from the root of the whole fucking world to import a package would be great
    • having the ability to do relative imports to the module I’m writing would be great

    These are like “module 101” things. Like, you’re right that the IDEs nowadays do most of that, but IDEs also get it wrong (“oh you meant a THAT package instead of that other one”) and reading the code without an IDE is still a thing (code reviews for example) which means the longer the import section (both vertically and horizontally) the harder it is to work with. And if you don’t look at all imports carefully you may miss a bug or a vulnerability.

    Also, Java is the only language I know of that has such a span on the horizontal. The memes about needing a widescreen monitor for Java is actually not a joke; I never had to scroll horizontally in any other language. To me that’s just insanity.

    Also, if you’re gonna make it the whole universe as the root of your package structure, we already have DNS and URI/URLs for that. Let me use that!

    And don’t get me started as only-files-as-packages while simultaneously having maybe-you-have-multiple-root for your code… makes discovery of related files to the one you’re working with very hard. Then of course the over reliance on generated code generating imports that might or might not exist yet because you just cloned your project…

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    And what's bad about that? As in, how is the verbosity a negative thing exactly? More so because virtually any tool can be configured to default-collapse these things if for your specific workflow you don't require the information.

    At the same time, since everything is verbose, you can get very explicit information if you need it.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Here's an example:

    https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api/blob/main/src/main/java/com/sublinks/sublinksapi/community/listeners/CommunityLinkPersonCommunityCreatedListener.java

    IMO that's a lot of code (and a whole dedicated file) just to (magically) hook a global event and increase the subscriber count when a link object is added.

    The worst part is that it's all copy/pasted into a neighbouring file which does the reverse:

    https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api/blob/main/src/main/java/com/sublinks/sublinksapi/community/listeners/CommunityLinkPersonCommunityDeletedListener.java

    It's not the end of the world or anything, I just think good code should surprise you with its simplicity. This surprises me with its complexity.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yeah but that's more on the coder. Like you indirectly say, they could just as well have had a single listener for community update events, since they all share the data structure for such events (I would assume, haven't looked around too much).

    And to me as a professional java coder, I will say it's just not complex. The scaffolding you mentally discard after a week of working with Java unless you're looking for something related to do the scaffolding - and then it's cool that it's all explicitly there, this has helped me countless times in my career and is one of the big strengths of such verbose languages - and beyond that and some design choices I would not have made that way related to naming and organization, there's not much code there to begin with. In modern Java you might just do this in a lambda supplied in the place where you hook the events, anyways.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I find that Java is overly Verbose, but it’s much better than the alternative of underly verbose.

    Java really follows the single class for single functionality principle, so in theory it makes sense to have these located in different classes. It should probably be abstracted to a shared method, but it shouldn’t be in the same file.

    At least to me this looks like simplicity, but I’ve been writing Java in some capacity since 2012.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    It's not just the visible complexity in this one file. The point of it is to keep a subscriber count in sync, but you have that code I referenced above, plus:

    LinkPersonCommunityCreatedEvent LinkPersonCommunityDeletedEvent LinkPersonCommunityCreatedPublisher LinkPersonCommunityDeletedPublisher

    And then there are things like LinkPersonCommunityUpdated[Event/Publisher] which don't even seem to be used.

    This is all boilerplate IMO.

    And all of that only (currently) serves keeping that subscriber count up to date.

    And then there's the hidden complexity of how things get wired up with spring.

    And after all that it's still fragile because that event is not tied to object creation:

      @Transactional
  public void addLink(Person person, Community community, LinkPersonCommunityType type) {

    final LinkPersonCommunity newLink = LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community)
        .person(person).linkType(type).build();
    person.getLinkPersonCommunity().add(newLink);
    community.getLinkPersonCommunity().add(newLink);
    linkPersonCommunityRepository.save(newLink);
    linkPersonCommunityCreatedPublisher.publish(newLink);
  }

    And there's some code here:

    https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api/blob/main/src/main/java/com/sublinks/sublinksapi/api/lemmy/v3/community/controllers/CommunityOwnerController.java#L138C31-L138C50

        final Set<LinkPersonCommunity> linkPersonCommunities = new LinkedHashSet<>();
    linkPersonCommunities.add(LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community).person(person)
        .linkType(LinkPersonCommunityType.owner).build());
    linkPersonCommunities.add(LinkPersonCommunity.builder().community(community).person(person)
        .linkType(LinkPersonCommunityType.follower).build());

    communityService.createCommunity(community);

    linkPersonCommunityRepository.saveAllAndFlush(linkPersonCommunities);

    that is able to bypass the community link service and create links in the repository directly, which would presumably not trigger than event.

    Maybe there's a good reason for that, but it sure looks fragile to me.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    how is the verbosity a negative thing exactly

    Fun fact, studies have found that the number of bugs in a program is proportional to the number of lines of codes, across languages. More lines of codes, more bugs, even for the same math and edge cases. So a more verbose language tends to have more bugs.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Interesting, but did this include web code and code only one person really ever works on?

    Because on the pure backend level, I have observed the reverse over my career. The shorter, the "smarter", the "cooler" the code, the more buggy it is. Not based on the code itself, but based on the developer inevitably leaving the company at some point. Meaning that what matters all of is a sudden is how verbose, how documented and how explicit the code is, because the bugs come from someone else messing with it as they get to take it over. It's a legacy problem in a lot of ways.

    Hence me saying that if solo projects are included, they probably tilt this massively as they'll never really run into this problem. Like say, you just scan github or something. Of course most projects in there are solo, of course the more lines the more room for bugs.
    But in an environment where you're not solo coding, the issue is not getting the code to run and having it have no programmed bugs, but to be able to have someone else understand what you did and wanted to do in a meaningful amount of time, especially as they have to mutate your code over years and decades. Or maybe it's just that the bugs no longer are what "matters", as fixing code bugs is cheap compared to the endless hours wasted from "clever" code being unmaintainable. 🤷

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    There's nothing wrong with java

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There is nothing inherently wrong with Java I would speculate, but it can be a royal pain in the ass to manage if you just need one application to work.

    I know the basics of the language, but from what I have seen managing it, I don't like it. Just from being in security, I constantly hit barriers with devs because of versioning issues. There is always some ancient app running on a version of Java that can't be updated, for whatever reason. Version management is always a pain, but with Java? Goddamn.

    I admit ignorance about the details of Java and how awesome it is for job security. There is no way in hell I could even debate anyone who has watched a single video on YouTube about Java. However, from what I have seen, it either works great or it fails explosively with billions of randomly allocated threads attempting to suck memory from every other server within 50 miles.

    If it's awesome to code with, cool. I am just a little salty from my experiences, as you can tell.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Legacy Java software is a massive pain in the ass. No arguments there. I’ve been migrating an app from Java 11->17 for the last 2 months and it’s a versioning mess. So many libraries deprecated and removed that don’t have easy replacements.

    It’s great because things don’t break when they’re running, but the problem is upgrading.

    Version management does seem to have become better with the last couple versions

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago* (14 children)

    Who cares? If it works, it works.

    The biggest strength of Java is that many programmers has years or even decades of experience in it.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    i know right! same thing with PHP! many progs decades experience hahaha

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Same thing with COBOL! So many devs with ... Wait. Are any COBOL devs even alive still?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Same thing with COBOL! So many devs with … Wait. Are any COBOL devs even alive still?

    I promise you one thing, those that are still alive are making bank right now.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I care, as someone who self hosts and have been doing so for 22 years. Java has always been the most annoying thing to maintain as a holster, especially on low resourced machines, like my raspi

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I love Java.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    As someone who used to be a Java programmer, I can't make any sense of that statement.

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