[matsemann]

I tried to keep my post very little opinionated, and just write what I've seen the last couple of years. While you have some good points in yours, it's not necessarily the best idea to go straight for these "hipper" things if one's trying to break into java dev. Then it's easier to start with the boring stuff everyone use, as that is what one most likely will encounter.

As for Hibernate, I've seen a trend of using ORMs less and less. And if it's used, it's in a simple dao layer so that the rest of the application doesn't have to deal with how data is fetched.