At present time, Java8 is acceptable (wit lambdas, RxJava, etc.). But yes, you are right: Spring, Hibernate, JBoss, etc. are huge reason to quit.<p>My own web projects in java 15 years ago were coded in java and glued by JavaScript (Rhino) with templates in JavaScript, which were compiled into bytecode for speed: fast, secure, simple, 10x faster to code.