Let me tell you about building things with Java. It’s like having a massive, well-organized toolbox. You could build a house using just a hammer, a saw, and sheer willpower, but it would take forever. Frameworks are the power tools in that box. They handle the repetitive, tricky structural parts so you can focus on designing the rooms and making the house a home—your actual business logic.

I write code for a living, and choosing the right framework can be the difference between a project that soars and one that stalls in complexity. Over the years, I’ve used many of them. Today, I want to walk you through ten that are shaping how modern applications are built. I’ll explain what each one does best and show you a tiny piece of code to give you a feel for it. Think of this as a quick tour of the most useful tools in the shed.

We’ll start with the one you’ve almost certainly heard of.

If you need to get a web application up and running quickly, this is often the first stop. It takes the powerful Spring Framework and removes the tedious setup. You know how some toys come with “some assembly required” and a hundred confusing screws? This framework comes pre-assembled. You just provide the logic.

The magic is in its opinionated defaults. It automatically configures things based on the libraries you have on your classpath. Need a database? Add a starter dependency. Need security? Add another. It even has a built-in web server, so you can run your application as a simple, self-contained .jar file.

Here’s what a complete, running web service looks like.

@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
public class MyFirstApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(MyFirstApp.class, args);
    }
    @GetMapping("/greet")
    public String sendGreeting() {
        return "The service is alive!";
    }
}

That’s it. One file. You run the main method, and you have a server listening on a port, ready to respond to requests. For me, the real value is the ecosystem. Almost any problem you encounter—connecting to a database, sending messages, securing endpoints—has a tried-and-tested Spring module. It’s a versatile foundation for everything from a simple prototype to a large, modular system.

Now, let’s say your application isn’t one big house but a neighborhood of small, independent cottages (microservices). Starting each cottage should be fast, and it shouldn’t use much memory. Traditional frameworks that rely heavily on runtime reflection can be slow to start. This framework was built to solve that.

It offers features you might recognize, like dependency injection, but it does its work at compile time, not while the application is running. This means your service starts in milliseconds, not seconds, which is crucial in serverless environments or tight container schedules.

The code feels familiar but leaner.

@Controller("/simple")
public class QuickController {
    @Get("/")
    public String respond() {
        return "Ready for action.";
    }
}

I’ve used this for functions that need to scale instantly. The fast startup time and low memory overhead are tangible benefits when you’re managing hundreds of instances. The stack traces are also cleaner because there’s less framework magic happening at runtime, which makes debugging less of a puzzle.

This framework asks a bold question: what if Java was as fast to start and as frugal with memory as Go? It’s designed from the ground up for a world run by containers and orchestrated by Kubernetes. It supports a blend of programming styles and has a killer feature: the ability to compile your application into a native executable.

A native executable compiles your Java code, the framework, and the necessary parts of the Java runtime down to machine code. The result is an incredibly fast-starting, tiny binary that uses very little RAM. Perfect for high-density deployment.

Developing with it is also a joy. Its live coding mode lets you see changes instantly without restarting the server. Here’s a basic REST endpoint.

@Path("/api")
public class ApiResource {
    @GET
    @Produces(MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN)
    public String getData() {
        return "Data from a native-ready app.";
    }
}

When I’m building something destined for a cloud-native pipeline where resource efficiency is critical, this framework is a top contender. The developer experience with live reload and the production benefits of native compilation create a powerful combination.

What if your application needs to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections, like a chat server or a real-time trading system? A traditional, thread-per-request model would buckle under the load. This toolkit is built for that world. It’s reactive and event-driven at its core.

Instead of blocking threads waiting for database queries or network calls, it uses asynchronous callbacks. A small number of threads can handle a massive amount of work by never sitting idle. It also has a built-in event bus that lets different parts of your application communicate seamlessly.

You can build a raw HTTP server in just a few lines.

Vertx vertx = Vertx.vertx();
vertx.createHttpServer()
     .requestHandler(request -> {
         request.response().end("Handled asynchronously!");
     })
     .listen(8888);

I reach for this when I need raw performance and non-blocking operations. It’s less of a full-stack framework and more of a powerful toolkit. You can use it to build a complete microservice, or you can embed it within another application to handle specific high-concurrency tasks. The learning curve is a bit steeper, but the payoff in scalability is huge.

In large corporations, stability and long-term support are sometimes more important than the latest features. This is the standard, the blueprint. It’s not a single product but a set of specifications that many vendors (like IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle) implement.

Using it means you are building on agreed-upon standards for things like database connectivity, messaging, and web services. The big advantage is portability. Your application should, in theory, be able to run on any compatible server without code changes, avoiding being locked into one vendor’s ecosystem.

The code is declarative and annotation-based.

@Stateless
public class CustomerService {
    @PersistenceContext
    private EntityManager entityManager;
    public void addCustomer(Customer cust) {
        entityManager.persist(cust);
    }
}

For long-lived enterprise projects where the architecture may need to outlast any single framework’s popularity, this is a safe, robust choice. It provides a solid, if sometimes less agile, foundation for complex business systems.

This framework comes from a different perspective, influenced by the dynamic productivity seen in languages like Ruby and Scala. It’s a full-stack web framework that is stateless, asynchronous, and developer-friendly. Its “hot reload” means you can change your code and see the result in the browser instantly without manually restarting the server.

It’s built on proven technologies like Akka for actor-based concurrency and Netty for non-blocking I/O. This makes it excellent for applications that require real-time features, like collaborative tools or live updates.

A controller looks clean and simple.

public class DashboardController extends Controller {
    public Result liveStats() {
        return ok(views.html.stats.render());
    }
}

I’ve enjoyed using this for consumer-facing web applications that demand a smooth, interactive user experience. The development cycle is incredibly fast, which is great for prototyping and iterating. It feels modern and web-centric.

Sometimes, you don’t want a full-stack solution or a lot of automated magic. You want a collection of solid, reliable libraries bundled together sensibly. This framework does exactly that. It picks best-in-class libraries for HTTP serving (Jetty), REST APIs (Jersey), JSON (Jackson), and metrics, and glues them together with a simple configuration.

It’s designed to create focused, RESTful web services that are “operationally sane” out of the box. It gives you a lot of control and transparency. You build a single “fat jar” file that contains everything needed to run.

The application class is straightforward.

public class MyServiceApp extends Application<MyConfig> {
    @Override
    public void run(MyConfig config, Environment env) {
        env.jersey().register(new ApiResource());
    }
}

When I need to build a simple, maintainable microservice API and I want to understand exactly what’s happening under the hood, I often choose this. It has a “do one thing and do it well” philosophy that I appreciate for smaller, focused services.

This is a classic. For many years, it was the dominant framework for building Java web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. It uses a configuration file (usually XML) to map web requests to specific Action classes, which then prepare data for a View (like a JSP page).

While it’s not the choice for greenfield projects today, it powers a vast amount of legacy enterprise software. Understanding it is often about maintaining and modernizing existing systems.

Configuration is centralized.

<struts>
    <action name="viewProfile" class="com.company.ProfileAction">
        <result name="success">/profile.jsp</result>
    </action>
</struts>

My experience with it has largely been in supporting and refactoring older applications. Its strength was a clear separation of concerns for its time, but its configuration-heavy model feels cumbersome compared to today’s annotation-driven or code-based approaches.

This isn’t a framework in the traditional sense. It’s a development platform, a code generator. You answer questions about your project in a command-line wizard, and it generates a complete, production-ready application for you. The typical output is a Spring Boot backend with an Angular, React, or Vue frontend, all wired together with authentication, database setup, and more.

It’s the ultimate project starter. It removes days or weeks of initial boilerplate setup and configuration.

You run it from the command line.

# Create a new directory and run JHipster
jhipster
# Answer questions: Monolith or microservices? Database type? Frontend framework?

I’ve used this to kickstart projects when the goal is to get a full-stack team working on features immediately, not on infrastructure. It provides a consistent, opinionated structure that includes best practices for testing, API documentation, and even Docker deployment scripts. It’s a massive accelerator.

Our final tool offers two distinct ways to build microservices in one project. The first way is a lightweight, functional-style microframework. The second way follows the MicroProfile standard, which provides a familiar, annotation-based model for enterprise Java developers. You can pick the style that fits your team or even mix them.

It’s designed to be simple, fast, and cloud-native, with a small footprint. Developed by Oracle, it’s a strong choice for new microservice architectures.

Here’s the simple, functional style.

// Helidon SE: A lightweight routing style
Routing routing = Routing.builder()
    .get("/status", (request, response) -> response.send("All systems go."))
    .build();
WebServer.create(routing).start();

The dual-model approach is interesting. If my team values simplicity and direct control, I might use the microframework style. If we need standards-based features like distributed tracing and health checks that come with MicroProfile, we can use the other model. This flexibility is its main appeal.

So, how do you choose? There’s no single best answer. It depends entirely on what you’re building and who is building it.

Are you prototyping a web app quickly? Consider the first or sixth options. Building tiny, fast-starting cloud functions? Look at the second or third. Need to handle massive real-time traffic? The fourth option is powerful. Working in a large enterprise with strict standards? The fifth might be required. Starting a complex full-stack project with a team? The ninth option can save months.

My personal process is to ask a few questions. What are the performance constraints? What is my team already comfortable with? How will this be deployed and operated? The best framework is the one that aligns with your project’s specific goals and disappears into the background, letting you write the code that matters. These ten tools give you a remarkable range of options to do just that.