Dropwizard and Play are very good alternatives to Spring if you don't need the whole kitchen sink or you absolutely want to use X library for Y application func

Dropwizard and Play are very good alternatives to Spring if you don't need the whole kitchen sink or you absolutely want to use X library for Y application function and Spring doesn't necessarily have very good out of the box support for said library. The upside of Spring over Dropwizard or Play (or any of the lighter touch frameworks) is that it's so much more than an MVC or REST controller framework. The report in question is literally comparing it against the entire Java EE ecosystem. Spring is not a library or a framework anymore, it's practically an entire stack that you can pick and choose from. Play and DW are likely to be easier to get your head around than Spring, there's a lot of magic going on in there and (not unlike getting into the JS world these days) you will find that setting the thing up from scratch takes a whole lot more time than you ever would have guessed. There's 1000 ways to do the same thing and sometimes doing it one way is a real issue later on, and worst of all it may not be apparent that that is the root source of some seemingly unrelated issue. Spring Boot aims to solve a lot of that by taking an opinionated approach to how the project should be laid out, libraries, and default configuarations- more along the lines of a .NET MVC + database, etc. There's still the same amount of complexity and configuration, it's just hidden from you until you need to dig in. I generally use Spring Boot to start greenfield projects these days, we deploy to AWS and their extra libraries for handling and working with that save a lot of boilerplate that's so common with Java. I would suggest you get your feet wet with either GP or DW, but don't forget about Spring Boot down the road. I've gotten to the point where I've got a stack including Vault (secrets) + Spring Config Server (distributed config application) + a fleet of various Spring Boot microservices running in Docker on AWS and they (mostly) just startup and run the way I wanted them to. It's really awesome, and wildly overkill for that proof of concept API or personal project we would be doing a lot of, but allows me to run my company without a huge team.