Couldn't agree more with this. IMO Dropwizard (with help from JAX-RS) has greatly simplified the process of spinning up a basic REST web service: embedded Jetty

Couldn't agree more with this. IMO Dropwizard (with help from JAX-RS) has greatly simplified the process of spinning up a basic REST web service: embedded Jetty by default, Jersey support, Logback (talk about simplifying the world of mess known as Java logging), Jackson-based JSON support, etc. Not to mention (despite my many gripes with Maven) being able to simply build this thing as a fat JAR and go. This new framework, Civilian, on the other hand seems to be going back to over-complicating everything: requires servlet container by default, a shiny new templating language, HTML forms processing, etc.