I think it depends on the platform, and libraries available on said platform. On the JVM, I create webapps using a @ServletContextListener class, which essenti

I think it depends on the platform, and libraries available on said platform. On the JVM, I create webapps using a @ServletContextListener class, which essentially is a "main" that gets the servlet context passed to it. You could call this implicit, but it is at least the only implicit thing you need. I have 5 lines that read in and left merge some config files. I manually invoke a spring context for setup/teardown of stateful stuff like database connections, queue connections, etc, and initialization of core services using these. Some more lines to set up the Jersey controllers on the servlet, maybe asset-pipeline or something else for handling static files, and we're up to a total of 100-150 lines of initialization/boilerplate. The win here is that there is absolutely nothing implicit about my app besides from the invocation of "main". My main beef with frameworks is the implicitness. Great when it works, but I'm so tired of hitting some kind of bug where some implicit thing stops happening for whatever reason and having to trace it down in the framework bowels. In my experience, there is very little difference between learning a framework vs learning a platform (JVM servlets) and a few core libraries (spring-context, Apache's data source for DB connections, JMS for queue stuff, Jersey for servlets, spring-security for auth).