My personal advice: Writing a service? Use dropwizard[0] Avoid EE6's version of CDI (WELD/OWB) and EE6 all together. Its slow and causes more problems than

My personal advice: Writing a service? Use dropwizard[0] Avoid EE6's version of CDI (WELD/OWB) and EE6 all together. Its slow and causes more problems than its worth. If you really want CDI, use gluice. Guava is your friend. Avoid JPA, specifically the parts regarding session management. Never liked it myself and Ebean[1] is a far cleaner ORM which reuses the JPA annotations for mapping classes. Writing a user facing website? I don't have a good answer here honestly. JSF/EE6 is terrible, GWT - yuck, Wicket - yuck, in my opinion they all suck. For related options Grails seems ok, Play! seems ok, Rails on JRuby seems ok but I haven't used any of them enough to have any real opinion of them. We're currently using angular.js and Jersey for the API on the backend. Groovy 2 is pretty awesome when performance isn't critical, use it. [0] http://dropwizard.codahale.com/ http://dropwizard.codahale.com/ [1] http://www.avaje.org/ http://www.avaje.org/