[exabrial]

For internet facing webapps where infinite customization of html/css is important: Jakarta EE: Java 17/CDI/Quarkus for the backend, HTMX for the frontend. Quarkus is now standards based and has a large community. Java executes at near CPP speed but with memory safety. Java has the literal best debugger in the industry and also the combination of CDI and Mockito make writing true unit tests easy and fast. It literally has everything.

Honestly though, the vast majority of webapps I implement are "boring" and the technology behind them needs to be boring and focus on productivity and maintainability. For this I usually select JakarataEE and JSF/Primefaces. Component based frameworks like this are stupid easy to slap together forms and business processes for internal webapps.

[MichaelNolan]

Are you sticking with java 17 for a specific reason instead of java 21/latest? Besides that I agree with everything you wrote, Java is an incredible ecosystem.

[nogridbag]

Quarkus only officially supported Java 21 a few days ago. I'm planning on upgrading our app this week.

[exabrial]

17 for the minute, although Tomcat already has support for virtual threads