Spring Boot

Spring Boot is the enterprise Java framework that somehow became pleasant to use. It takes the massive Spring ecosystem and adds sensible defaults, auto-configuration, and embedded servers so you can ship a production app without writing XML or fighting dependency hell.

If you're building enterprise services in a Java shop, this is the default. 80K+ stars and adoption at basically every Fortune 500 company that runs Java. Quarkus is the cloud-native challenger — faster startup, lower memory, GraalVM-native compilation. Micronaut does the same with compile-time DI. For non-Java shops, Django, Rails, or Express are the obvious alternatives.

Spring Boot's strength is the ecosystem: Spring Security, Spring Data, Spring Cloud. Need OAuth? Three annotations. Need a database? Auto-configured. The documentation is exceptional and the community is enormous.

The catch: it's still Java. Memory hungry, verbose compared to modern alternatives, and the "magic" auto-configuration can be maddening to debug when it guesses wrong. If you're a solo founder, the developer velocity of Rails or Next.js will run circles around Spring Boot.