[olavgg]

I use Grails which is very similar to Rails and a lot easier and productive than Spring Boot. Good defaults makes application building a much smoother experience. Grails is still Spring Boot, and you can still code like it was a pure Spring Boot application.

Grails has its own ORM called GORM, which can use several different backends like Hibernate/MongoDB

Groovy is a great language, with the best from dynamic languages and yet still very similar to Java. I would say there is no learning curve for Java developers with Groovy.

Grails has also been highly optimized the last few years and runs great on systems with 1 vcpu and 256MB RAM. Grails also has a great and friendly community, come and say hello in our Slack channel https://grails-slack.cfapps.io/

[oftenwrong]

I've had some not-so-great experiences developing web services with Spring Boot, Hibernate, Groovy itself, Grails.

We now stick to plain old Java with no annotations, Ratpack, jOOQ, etc.

In my experience, and opinion: Lack of static typing is a good way to make shooting yourself in the foot easy. Annotation-driven magic sucks. Just Writing Queries causes fewer headaches than using an ORM. Basically, libraries over frameworks. YMMV.

[olavgg]

I do understand why you feel like that, I've been there too. No framework is a silver bullet, but over time you will see the value in them.

One thing though, with Groovy you can choose between dynamic and static typing. These days everyone agrees that you should use static typing with Groovy as much as possible. Use dynamic typing when static typing becomes hard, for example when working with JSON objects.

And Hibernate is really flexible with how close you get can native queries, the documentation however is not convenient there. But Hibernate developers like Vlad Mihalcea is working hard to document how you can do this and is writing blog posts and answering questions on Stack Overflow. I am really grateful for the effort he puts in helping everyone.