> Now it is easier to develop MVP web app using Spring Boot than Rails.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one.

Seriously, though, I'm really, really glad to see this come up this morning.

I've done a lot of .NET lately, but Rails has been my main tool for 10 years. However, because it's (apparently) a strange, new, unproven-and-potentially-exceedingly-insecure framework, and because I'm the ONLY PERSON in a company of SIXTY THOUSAND employees who could possibly write a program with it, I've been forced to stop using it. I took FOUR MONTHS of arguing about it with the powers-that-be to conclude that I should use Java instead. I have 3 web applications to write, right now, with some flavor of Java EE.

For a couple of weeks, I've been trying to bootstrap an environment to read an existing database I had already created with Rails, and filled with production data. I thought it would have been straightforward. I'm trying to use current versions:

* Netbeans 8.2
* Java 1.8
* Gradle 4.6
* SpringMVC 5.0.4
* Hibernate 5.2.15

I can't find a single, working example that demonstrates this stack. Not a single one, on the entirety of the internet! Every example I can find switches out some part of that stack, and makes the flow different. Netbeans and Eclipse do things differently, and both have about 3 different ways to generate a Java web application.

Then there's the whole Maven thing. I guess most of the world hasn't really switched to Gradle, despite their site's glowing description of the advantages?

And what is "Spring Framework?" There's really several different pieces of that puzzle, and that's fine, but, at the end of the day, show me the code, AND TELL ME WHERE TO PUT IT IN THE FILE STRUCTURE TO MAKE IT WORK.

Most of the examples I can find about how to write a Java web application never even get to the point of pulling data from a database, and so finding an example that uses either Hibernate OR JPA is almost non-existent. This just makes me shake my head.

My current direction, which I was all set to get serious with today, was to use Groovy on Grails, under IntelliJ IDEA. After a couple of weeks of experimentation, it's the only stack I've been able to bootstrap, and actually get a listing of objects from the database. I feel it probably takes too many liberties to simplify the workflow, and will quickly lead to a bottleneck I don't know how to get out of, but, dammit, it's the only thing I can find some reasonable examples for.

(But even IDEA wants to generate a stack based on the non-current Spring 4.3.14, and Hibernate 5.1.5. Spring 5 is released. Why doesn't IDEA "support" it yet? What little examples I can find show that a lot of things are changing from Spring 4 to 5.)

Through this learning process, I've realized just how much tribal knowledge I've absorbed about Rails. I "grew up" with Rails. I was playing with it in the 0.x days, got serious with it in the early 2.x era, and have stayed with it ever since. I understood that learning how to use another web stack would be a challenge. While the actual language is hardly a concern to me, I had no idea that the chaos of choices and versions would complicate the process of just trying to get started. At the very least, when you say "Rails X.0", you've described all the major pieces of the stack, and the IDE is immaterial. That is simply not the case in the Java world.

So I've said all of this to set the context in order to ask you this: What is the "right" framework stack to use to create a Java web application TODAY? And by "right," I mean "most popular," in order to make finding answers as easy as possible. For the sake of argument, the 3 apps I need to write are essentially simple CRUD applications, so there are no esoteric requirements to consider. What's the most straightforward and maintainable approach, and where's the definitive documentation on how to configure it? I'm ready to go all-in on SOMETHING, but I'm overwhelmed with choices and a lack of examples.