There is [Grails](https://grails.org/) which I honestly did not use so I can't comment on it but people seem to like it. It is Groovy based though. The most common framework nowadays is Spring and its ilk (including Spring MVC and its friends). BUT there is Spring Boot which is basically a meta framework which takes an opinionated "sensible defaults for all the stuff" approach and you can get a project working with 5 clicks basically. Try out the [Spring Boot initializr](https://start.spring.io/). The biggest problem with these frameworks is the magic. While you are fine with the defaults it works. You can check the config files and tinker with them but there are a lot of layers to peel away if you are presented with some exotic Exception which will happen sooner or later. I'm also interested in what other options I have in Javaland currently because I'm steering away from it to Clojure islands and even the Node archipelago...
I'll put a second vote for Spring Boot. You're right that when the magic fails it can get a little complicated. However, I've found Spring documentation to be very good. Also, once you understand a little of how it's put together it becomes pretty easy to selectively replace whatever piece of the magic with your own custom version.
I know but I'm not sure I want to do it every time the magic breaks. In clojure for example I only have to dig into compojure and ring 4-5 layers deep involving 20 files. With spring with all the reflection, indirection (annotation processing) and such it is common to have a call stack 30-40 levels deep. Much more time consuming to debug imho.
> I can't comment on it but people seem to like it
Not sure how many Grails 2.x systems out there have been upgraded to Grails 3.x, or how many new Grails systems have been started in version 3.x. I don't think it's many though, which suggests a general decline in Grails use.
