Ask HN: Closest thing to Django in Java world?

6 points·rlawson··4 comments

Our team maintains a lot of internal apps in Java (some Spring, some older frameworks). I miss the productivity of Django. What is the closest equivalent in the Java world?

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https://micronaut.io/

https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot

https://quarkus.io/

For Kotlin: https://ktor.io/

Java doesn't have a widely adopted framework for kickstarting development like Ruby on Rails or Django Admin Panel. Actually .net core comes much closer with web apis and the default web projects you can build. Spring boot is pretty good, but has a much bigger learning curve than Django or Rails IMHO, there are several templating frameworks that might help you but none of them are "standard", I seem to remember using Thymeleaf for something a long while back.

This is actually a great question. One where I don't have an off-hand answer.

Internal apps are a particular thing where 'good enough' is what you pretty much want most of the time. I would expect something with server-side rendering, admin scaffolding, data-driven views, and customizable templating.

I'm pretty sure you can mix-and-match to get all these things but it would be great to have one opinionated framework that takes the guesswork out of it and has google/stackoverflow-able how-tos.

JSF (renamed Jakarta Faces)

I know JSF might sound dated but it is actually thriving, with rich component libraries like Primefaces. See the latest:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7310-4

And check Primefaces: http://primefaces.org/showcase/index.xhtml

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