Spring vs. JavaEE is a topic that stopped being relevant five years ago. I cant believe anyone seriously considering any of these heavy duty teach stack in 2017. There are much much better choices out there even for Java developers, and if they can come out of their comfort zone a bit there is Clojure, Scala, Kotlin etc with MUCH nicer fraemworks
Sure, I used to work with Java EE in the enterprise. My team switched over entirely to working with Clojure over the course of the past 6 years. We build large applications for use at the hospital. For context, the projects I work on are typically implemented over several years by a team of 5-10 developers.
We find that our projects now have drastically less code doing the same types of things. Not only that, but the code we do write is predominantly declarative in nature. Clojure makes it much easier to separate the intent of the code from the implementation details.
Conversely, having less code means we're less attached to it. When it takes a 1000 lines to solve a problem, you tend to keep them around once you get a solution working. When you have 100 lines, it's much easier to throw them away and write a cleaner solution when you understand the problem.
Clojure projects are easier to debug and maintain thanks to pervasive immutability in the language. This allows us to safely think about parts of the application in isolation. When I come back to code that I wrote a few months ago and make a change, I know that the change is local and it's not going to affect another part of the project via side effects.
Clojure facilitates interactive development by providing strong integration between the editor and the REPL. When we're building new features, we're able to experiment interactively to see what approach will work best.
Since Clojure also runs in the browser with ClojureScript, we're able to use the same language for the full stack. This also lets us share code, such as validation logic, between the client and the server.
Meanwhile, we're still able to leverage existing Java libraries, infrastructure, and reap all the benefits of using the JVM.
You are barking up the wrong tree. I am also a Clojure enthusiast and I also use it wherever I can. I was genuinely interested to hear about a Java alternative to Spring because I failed to find any. I don't use java in production anymore though, only Kotlin and Clojure.
Fair enough, from what I know Dropwizard is supposed to be pretty decent. I have a few friends working in Java shops who seem to like it. However, I haven't used it myself, so can't really comment how it compares to Spring overall.
