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I don't understand, what's Express? As for libraries and Java, I'd argue Java became a well established enterprise language and platform exactly because it makes such highly effective use of libraries.

It's the NodeJS webserver

See C#'s asp.net core minimal apis (a express clone). So it is definitely possible but you need to co-develop the language. I think as you point out.

It’s possible to have something like Express, take a look at Javalin.

But Java problem is not the mechanics, it’s that the community doesn’t want nice things.

Kinda now that Java has lambdas, but still async in that disn't work as easily as JS, which is important. This is only recently starting to change with Project Loom.

Javalin was inspired by https://sparkjava.com/ which was inspired by Sinatra (which I think also inspired Express?).

Anyway, libraries like this were only really feasible after Java 8 because of the reliance on lambdas. Having to instantiate anonymous nested classes for every "function" was a total pain before that.