I've used Dropwizard but with my latest project I dropped it in favor of assembling libraries manually. There's nothing wrong with Dropwizard per se, it's bigge

I've used Dropwizard but with my latest project I dropped it in favor of assembling libraries manually. There's nothing wrong with Dropwizard per se, it's biggest strength is that everything you need works out of the box, but it bundles some older versions of libraries (like jersey, jetty). I am now using latest Jersey, Jetty (embedded), Atmosphere, Ebean and RxJava with Kotlin. It wasn't that hard to setup everything manually and the benefit is that I can add anything I want. I work with Python and C# mostly and don't have that much experience with Java/JVM, but I really like this setup. I've also considered Play 2 with Java, but it didn't feel right to me and the documentation was out of date. Perhaps it's better with Scala, but I don't really want to learn an entire new language and ecosystem. Kotlin is similar to C# so for me it was a breeze to pick it up and I can transparently use any Java library with Kotlin by just importing it.