Some, if not most, of our judgments regarding technology stacks come either from third-party opinions or previous experiences. Yet, we seem to be adamant about them. For a long time (and sometimes even now), I've seen posts that detailed how Spring is bad because it uses XML for its configuration. Unfortunately, they blissfully ignore the fact that annotation-based configuration has been available for ages. Probably because of the same reason I recently read that Spring is bad... because of annotations. If you belong to this crowd, I've news for you: you can get rid of most annotations, and even more so if you're using Kotlin. In this post, I'd like to show you how to remove annotations for different features that Spring provides.
Annotation-Free Beans
The first place where we tend to set annotations is to register beans. Let's see how to move away from them. It involves several steps. We shall start from the following code: