As most of my daily tasks are being done in J2EE environment, I have goosebumps each time I hear "java" & "framework" used in one sentence. And that's not excitement, that's fear.
The only framework which I can recommend, is Dropwizard (http://dropwizard.codahale.com/), which tries not to be a framework, just a glue between some really nice libraries and tools.