> I can get a small web site serving JSON REST requests and memcache up in ten minutes with a simple Maven/Gradle build and full IDE integration.

Dropwizard is a great example of this. It's an opinionated (convention over configuration) Java framework for building REST web services. You can get a 'Hello World' web service up and running in literally 10 minutes following this tutorial http://www.dropwizard.io/1.0.0/docs/getting-started.html