test-driven-learning VS Grails

One approach I do not think many consider is starting with the Netty, which is used by many frameworks. We ended up using this for our current product, and while this gives the ultimate flexibility in handling requests it also heightens the bar somewhat for the ones employing its use, as it just gives you the nuts and bolts and it is up to you to make it play nice for your use-cases. I had to write quite a few learning tests to grok it.

And frameworks like Grails build conventions and helpers on top of Spring.

I don't have any direct experience and am only suggesting it because you mentioned RoR...But Grails (https://grails.org/) is basically the JVM version of RoR (Groovy on Rails -> Grails).

Grails - Spring under the hood. Much less boilerplate. Opinionated, which helps keep things consistent. Uses Spring-Security plugin for authentication.

Also, Grails, which a Rails like framework build on Groovy, a JVM scripting language.

Any JVM language to the rescue here? There’s one, but it’s not the one you’re thinking about. In a sign that this index may not accurately reflect our project reality, Groovy saw a meteoric rise of 0.86% to 1.04% last year! That was good for place 17. Yep, Groovy! Are people writing Gradle plugins in Groovy? Or is Grails having a resurgence? I’m as baffled as you are.