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These days I’d go with a JAX Rest backend. The frontend is pure HTML+JS (so no server side templates unless they make sense). No dependency injection but „hand-wired“ dependencies at the top level. I also don’t use ORMs anymore. This means a slower start in the beginning, but later in the project you’re not caught up in a net of a dozen intertwined frameworks.

Lightbend offers a couple good options. Play for web applications: https://www.playframework.com/

Lagom for microservices (which is based on Play): https://www.lagomframework.com/

I highly recommend Play as well.

I'd recommend looking at Quarkus for new JVM-based microservices, especially Kubernetes-based ones.

https://quarkus.io/

Cool, I'll check Quarkus out.

There are many alternatives to Spring if you prefer a more DIY approach. Namely Javalin, Micronaut, KTor (for Kotlin folk) and many more (Quarkus was already mentioned).

Spring however is the way to go if you come from a Rails/Django/ASP.NET background and want the framework that everything works with out of the box.