For traditional web development, I recommend spring-boot which is almost as easy as dropwizard, it also doesn't need an application container and fully supports Spring MVC, Spring Security and all other spring related goodies.
- Integrating with spring-security - Integrating spring-security-tags (sec:authorize etc) in the templates - Using a different template engine in general (wanted to use thymeleaf) - Not able to bind forms to objects - Enabling pagination
Please notice that all these are related to my specific needs (server side views) and, when trying dropwizard I had all these already solved with spring-mvc. Maybe if I kept pushing I'd be able to resolve most of these but, because of lack of documentation, and generaly because I understood that dropwizard should be used to create REST APIs, not server-side views I just switched to spring boot.
I stumbled on it a long time ago because I had the problem of Java devs needing to integrate templates built by front end devs and all the churn that goes along with it.
It uses custom tag attributes like th:href to swap the computed value in on template render so you can have a completely perfect looking HTML/CSS/JS template with the placeholder values without having to convert back and forth. It's just HTML with extra attributes that get ignored when not run through the rendering process.
You can use Spring Expressions, forms, and security with pretty much no configuration, it works awesome.
It supports partials and layouts and all the good stuff you'd want for reuse and it took me about 10 minutes to create a custom dialect for it that lets me use Thymeleaf and Vue.js together very nicely.
I can't recommend Thymeleaf enough.
<div ng-if="this() && that()" ...
<div ng-if="this() && that()" ...
If you want the unescaped output there are lots of things you can do. I did something similar for Vue.js in about twenty minutes and a few lines of code.