The most lean and interesting alternative IMO is Helidon SE. It's backed by Oracle and uses very sane approach.
The most pragmatic alternative IMO is Quarkus. I don't really like it, but it seems to be the most popular alternative to Spring and probably will become standard de facto, unless Spring will jump ahead with some revolutionary changes. It's backed by Red Hat and seems to have the most momentum.
The best approach IMO is not here yet. Frameworks, mentioned above, rely heavily on reactive architecture. It's just not needed with Project Loom, so there's plenty of unnecessary complications. They even rewriting JDBC drivers.
I'm going with Quarkus for now, but I'm waiting for ideal framework to appear.
What's your opinion on vert.x vs quarkus? For more general purpose web stuff, it seemed to me vert.x had more libraries.
Also, as for database, I really got fed up with hibernate (all configuration and stuff), do you know any simpler asynchronous / reactive alternative that handles object mapping? (automatically serializing from / into SQL objects).
Quarkus uses vert.x for web. What it does is provides a standard way with instructions to build a native image (along with some added functionality). I don't know if it's easy to build a native image from just vert.x app.
About database, sorry, I have no idea. Check out JDBI, JOOQ, those are most popular ones, AFAIK.
Also Quarkus adds reactive API to hibernate and some API to simplify some mundane Hibernate API, so maybe you'll like it.
The most pragmatic alternative IMO is Quarkus. I don't really like it, but it seems to be the most popular alternative to Spring and probably will become standard de facto, unless Spring will jump ahead with some revolutionary changes. It's backed by Red Hat and seems to have the most momentum.
The best approach IMO is not here yet. Frameworks, mentioned above, rely heavily on reactive architecture. It's just not needed with Project Loom, so there's plenty of unnecessary complications. They even rewriting JDBC drivers.
I'm going with Quarkus for now, but I'm waiting for ideal framework to appear.