[scalesolved]

1) If I had to switch from current stack (Java/Play Framework/Spring) I'd look at one of those, they all seem super healthy and a lot of remote work uses one of the 3 (I'm a fan of working remotely).

2) Whichever language you enjoy working with and be productive in (I've heard good things about Laravel), don't always think the grass is greener. I'd say try out the Play Framework https://playframework.com/ You can code in either Scala or Java and it'd make a change from dynamic languages for you.

3) I switched from Java to Ruby and back again and found the sweet spot of both, I think I've improved more since I stopped worrying if I was missing out and just concentrated on being productive at work and solving problems I enjoy outside of work.

[someguy1233]

Last time I looked at Play, I took one look at Akka/Reactive Programming and knew there was no chance of me touching that.

I might look at it again, this time staying far away from Akka. What's the performance like? Considering it's Java I would assume pretty good, but I'm not sure how bulky Play is

[scalesolved]

I don't touch any of the Akka stack, I certainly make use of the non blocking parts of the framework where I can. At my current company half our services are in Java on Play and the other half in PHP, the Java boxes run on half the number of servers and lower spec'd than PHP with about a 50% decrease in latency too.