Quarkus just moves the problem IMHO. I find it similarly convoluted to use as normal Spring. I had to deal with that a few months ago on a project. Honestly, it

Quarkus just moves the problem IMHO. I find it similarly convoluted to use as normal Spring. I had to deal with that a few months ago on a project. Honestly, it actually feels a lot like spring used to be; and not in a good way. Lots of annotation magic all over the place. I use Spring Boot by default. But I aggressively limit the use of annotation magic. I've never liked the byte code hacks people do to make annotations inject magical behavior. Hard to debug and painful when it does not work as expected. I don't think either of these frameworks have an edge over each other. You end up using a lot of the same underlying library ecosystem. I do like the annotation less direction that Spring has been taking since they started adding Kotlin support 4-5 years ago. If you want to, you can get rid of most annotations for things like dependency injection, defining controllers, transactions etc. Especially with Kotlin, this makes a lot of sense. With Java, dealing with builders is just a lot more painful without kotlin's DSL support. You basically end up with a lot of verbosity, method chaining, etc. But it's possible if you want to. It's a big reason, I prefer using Kotlin with Spring Boot. Makes the whole thing feel like a modern framework. The hard part with Spring Boot is being able to tell apart all the legacy and backwards compatible stuff from the actual current and proper way of doing things. There's a project that they've been pushing to get rid of all annotations: https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-fu/tree/main/kofu https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-fu/tr.... I suspect a lot of that stuff might be part of spring boot 3.x later this year. And quite a bit of it is actually already part of the current version of Spring. This makes spring boot very similar to what you'd do with ktor. All you do is call kotlin functions. No annotations. No reflection. No magic. Very little verbosity. It's all declarative. And a nice side effect is also that it makes things like spring-native easier, which they started supporting recently. It's very similar to using ktor with koin (for dependency injection). That combination is worth a try if you are looking for something lightweight and easy to use. Spring Boot has more features and complexity but it can be as simple to use as that if you know what you are doing. Mostly, keeping things simple is a good thing with Spring. Also, I don't tend to do everything the spring way. Spring integration is a bit of a double edged sword for example. It offers a subset of the features of the libraries that it integrates. If you want the full feature set, you end up working around that. IMHO, you should do that by default. I've removed spring integration from several projects.