[scottu1]

I'm with you that Spring has ALOT of parts. At my company they allowed us to use some parts of Spring and not others. Our stack was Spring MVC, with Apache Tiles, serving JSPs with some JQuery in there all wrapped up with Spring Security. It was much better than what we had before, JSF and ICEFaces and ADF. JSF frustrates me to no end.

Now we're moving towards a more modern stack. Using Jersey for REST is nice. It does make me enjoy Java again. You annotate resources in a Spring-like way, security was easy to implement. On the front-end we use a client side JavaScript Framework, JMVC (CanJS, EJS, etc). JMVC doesn't have as much traction as other frameworks, like Angular or Ember, but it is stable and covers what we need.

But when I go home, I try to stay away from Java. It's mostly Python (Flask, Tornado, Twisted) or lately some Node (Express) on the backend and Ember on the front. It's psychological. I program at work for work and at home to have fun. For me it just feels easier and more fun to stream code in Python.