ast-grep VS rewrite

It's unclear what the superpowers would be? Video doesn't show anything I can't do with an IDE or decent code editor, and there I also have refactoring tools, metadata like indicators for usages that can be used for navigating and so on.

Reminds me of UML-like diagrams over relational databases, except that it's generated one piece at a time. In practice I generate diagrams showing cyclomatic complexity much more often, and for code exploration outside the IDE I'd use ast-grep.

https://ast-grep.github.io/

This article illustrates the usage of ast-grep, a tool designed to locate and substitute patterns in your codebase, towards easing your migration to React 19.

This looks great, thanks for building and sharing it.

Interested folks may also want to check out ast-grep:

https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep

ast-grep is a command-line tool that lets you search and transform code written in many programming languages using abstract syntax trees (ASTs). ASTs are data structures that capture the syntactic and semantic structure of source code. With ast-grep, you can write patterns as if you are writing ordinary code, and it will match all code that has the same syntactical structure. And if you need more power, you can use YAML, a rule system that allows you to write more sophisticated linting rules or code modifications.

I really like this - it means the tool is available to people with familiarity of any of those four distribution mechanisms.

You can also download pre-built binaries from their releases page: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep/releases/tag/0.14.2

On top of that, they offer API bindings for it in three different languages:

- Rust (not yet stable): https://docs.rs/ast-grep-core/latest/ast_grep_core/

- JavaScript/TypeScript: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/js-api.html

- Python: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/py-api.html

It's rare to see a tool/library offer this depth of language support out of the box.

If you're into this sort of thing, there's OpenRewrite[1] for the Java ecosystem.

[1] https://docs.openrewrite.org/

> Spring has gotten so bloated.

I'd call Spring feature-rich than bloated. You can always shed weight that you don't want to carry.

> Plus there's multiple ways of doing the same thing. e.g. JPA, spring-data.

That's because there are different ways to solve a problem. Someone may want an ORM-based approach to connect to the database; they can choose spring-data-jpa. Someone may want to use JDBC with a light abstraction on top of it; they can choose spring-data-jdbc. It's all about choices and right tradeoffs and Spring offers plenty of them.

> they don't provide easy upgrade paths between majors versions

That's not my experience. I've been happily upgrading 2.x.x versions and plan to upgrade to 3.2.x when it is ready. But depending on the codebase, I admit it can be painful. Projects like OpenRewrite[1] might help here.

> and they stop updating vulnerabilities on older major versions.

This is not news. They want you to pay for extended support if you need it.

> No docs on migration.

They do maintain migration docs on GitHub wiki which are a lot more detailed than their blog posts on migration. Here's the latest one to upgrade from Spring Boot 2 to 3: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/wiki/Spring-B...

[1]: https://github.com/openrewrite/rewrite

The issue you may run into when migrating from Spring Boot 2.x to 3.x is the JEE namespace renames. Migrating code from 8 to 17 in my experience hasn't been all that difficult. In most projects, there are no changes to make. However, with the namespace change, you'll probably have to do some planning and testing. If you are migrating a lot of projects, check out Open Rewrite, it may help automate a lot of these upgrades (for both 8 to 17 and Spring Boot versions).

Couldn't OpenRewrite (https://docs.openrewrite.org) do a big part of this manual work?

Openrewrite would probably be a big help, see https://docs.openrewrite.org

In a similar vein there is OpenRewrite which is an open-source project that works in a similar way. It also has a lot of great refactorings already built in, like doing all the grunt work for migrating to JUnit 5, or replacing string concatenation in SLF4J log calls with parameterized formatting.

seems a case for https://docs.openrewrite.org/

https://github.com/openrewrite/rewrite might help