I am working on a machine learning library and I need a stopwatch to measure execution time for a method. It turns out Spring has a nice one, but does it make sense to use Spring for a non-web project? The good side is of course reusing code, but any downsides?
Thanks
Spring isn't just made for Web application. Spring MVC is the request-based framework that you normally used for web application. Now, if you only want the stopwatch utilities, nothing prevents you to only include the spring-core jar in your project.
Spring is not a web framework. Spring MVC sub-project is. Also Spring support multiple other web frameworks.
That being said you are free to use Spring IoC, AOP, persistence, etc. in desktop, standalone applications. I do it every day.
I've seen some Apache projects clone a few methods (or classes) from other Apache projects just to avoid adding a jar dependency when very specific functionality is all that is needed.
An alternative to including spring could be to use a more general purpose library. Two suggestions that are made here are Google Guava and Apache Commons Lang. I use both and the odds of finding other useful general purpose utilities in those projects is high.
