[karmakaze]

Not in any particular order (choose what fits your team): Kotlin or Java and a lighter framework (e.g. Javalin is to Spring as Sinatra is to Rails, with JDBI), a newer big framework (e.g. Micronaut, maybe Play, others), Phoenix/Elixir, Rails/Ruby+Sorbet, Go with libraries.

Edit: I just did a google search for "Java Framework" and get a lot of useless top-N lists with old content retitled "in 2020" with hits like: Hibernate (not a framework), JSF (JavaServer Faces), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Struts (The Later Version), DropWizard (seems to have stagnated and docs are all over the place. JDBI was extracted and has a life of its own).

[johnnycerberus]

Cmon, you can't be serious, do you really recommend Play, Micronaut, etc. over Spring ecosystem? Also if you want the benefits of GraalVM you can stay in the ecosystem today with Spring Native, moreover if you are ideologically against Spring then you should go with Quarkus because that's the next technology by maturity/popularity. How can you not go with Spring when REST services are today a solved problem? Why do you want to turn it into a problem by adopting something else that is not battle tested? In the company that I work for, Spring is ruling the microservices layer and we have a combination of Scala and Python for data pipelines that are not related to the behavior of the business logic, they only know one thing and that is data. Hibernate has not been a problem for us, I can say that I totally recommend it when you have multiple people working on a project, rather than polluting the codebase with raw SQL.

If you really want something exotic in Scala that is impossible to express in Java, Go, Ruby, Elixir etc., then take a look at the Typelevel (cats, cats-effect, http4s, doobie) ecosystem or ZIO. If purely functional programming is your cup of tea.

[karmakaze]

I'm not ideologically against Spring since I mentioned Micronaut being a modern take on it, without the outdated assumptions. I'm not familiar with Quarkus but someone else recommended it so may have a look at it. I'm currently at a Rails shop, but I see patterns evolving as teams get larger toward program construction patterns like Spring, persistence, repository, application model, etc. ActiveRecord as big as it is, is still much simpler than Spring/Hibernate with an EntityManager.

BTW, I did work at a startup for years building microservices with Spring which is where I ran into it's limitations. I basically worked around the EntityManager, JPQL, and query template caching where ever it was necessary, which was frequent. I'm not against query builders or data mappers, having worked on making one myself[0]. I'm just more performance/resource conscious than most.

[0] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql