> Java layers: I know, but using Java usually also entails using Spring and Hibernate and "doing things the proper way" :-/ I highly suggest looking into Guice

> Java layers: I know, but using Java usually also entails using Spring and Hibernate and "doing things the proper way" :-/ I highly suggest looking into Guice (why defeat the advantage of Java's static typing by passing strings around through XML documents?) and jDBI (ORMs are evil, jDBI takes a lot of the boiler plate out of writing JDBC calls: http://jdbi.org/ http://jdbi.org/). If you absolutely must use Spring, at least use Spring's JavaConfig (as opposed to XML based configuration) and SimpleJdbcTemplate (another way to avoid the boiler plate of JDBC without going to an ORM). JVM doesn't mean having to use Java (but your partner seems to be dead against Scala, which is his loss). Java, however, doesn't mean having to use Spring and JEE.