My new favorite: Micronaut [1]. It's the first java based framework (though I am using Groovy with it) that just "does what I want" with sensible defaults for a

My new favorite: Micronaut [1]. It's the first java based framework (though I am using Groovy with it) that just "does what I want" with sensible defaults for a modern REST based API: simple annotation based URI spec on methods with bindings to arguments for parameters, and defaults to JSON responses with encoding etc all built in. You can hook it to hibernate, GORM etc., but I just use Groovy's built in Sql classes which essentially are as good as a minimalistic ORM. Very simple, no fuss, "just works" as advertised. [1] http://micronaut.io/ http://micronaut.io/