So, is the answer to just bail on Java forever? I haven't written anything legitimate in Java in about two years, but I don't remember it being that bad.
For reference, what types of languages/frameworks do you like to work with?
For reference, what types of languages/frameworks do you like to work with?
I've also had good luck with Spring Boot, but it's a little magical for my tastes - I vastly prefer Guice for Java DI - just straightforward and predictable (that's just my subjective take though).
Dropwizard is a good bundling of stacks, but I don't think it'd match my personal preferences.
I will say that doing rest-style service work in modern Java frameworks is actually not too bad these days. Java 8 makes it even nicer.
IntelliJ (Jetbrains are the leaders behind Kotlin) has first class support for the language. Gradle will have support for Kotlin as it's DSL in it's next major iteration.
Despite some very loud people on the internet, it seems to have close to zero adoption, and JetBrains making big promises and then failing to deliver anything is not really helping them.