Not dropwizard. It is really really good if you are building rest services for other things to talk to. it is not so good on the web side of things, but then again, it isn't meant to be.
Spring MVC is still good enough for most things. Stay away from JSF.
I really appreciated the original simplicity and abstraction that Spring brought to the Java world. But of late Spring frameworks have become very invasive for web applications and does not cleanly integrate with other frameworks (It is not seamless - Had a lot of heartburn with a JSF + Spring app. CDI and Spring DI does not play along nice at all).
Moreover, with the renewed interest in making the server side layer of the web applications to be as stateless as possible and leave the state transitions and presentation to the client side HTML/CSS & JS, I am finding it hard to justify having Spring on the backend.
Dropwizard along with a SPA type AngularJS based application seems to be a good alternative, what am I missing? Why are we not seeing much traction on this framework?
grails is the best framework I have seen so far. sensible defaults inspired from rails is good. you don't have to learn groovy since it is a superset of java. you can learn on the way .... very less entry barrier and learning curve
Play Framework is still in 'Trial' category per the radar.
However, Dropwizard framework is in 'Adopt' category. [http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/#/languages-and-frameworks]
Interestingly, Spring MVC was not even mentioned.
What are your suggestions?