| I work for Pivotal so I'm biased. But I'd take a long look at Sprint Boot in terms of "fun , productive , practical" Java: https://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/ In particular:
- curated and tested open source library dependencies to the point that you can generate a single JAR for anything you might want to build on the server: http://start.spring.io/ - Annotations and APIs to make REST service development a breeze - native support to build apps that use SQL, NoSQL and other Data systems without plumbing: http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/refe... - SSH shell/CLI into your JVM to manage your JVM - Actuator to provide production metrics for your system - declarative security that allows you to build Oauth2 enabled apps in maybe 20 lines of code/annotations - great symbiosis with modern JavaScript for responsive sites, eg https://spring.io/blog/2015/01/12/spring-and-angular-js-a-se... - Cloud connectors to make it easy to run your app on Heroku, Kubernetes, Mesos or Cloud Foundry, or to leverage NetflixOSS components, or to build stream processing applications (Spring cloud stream / data flow) It is being downloaded and used at a very high rate (a couple million a month). |