Vert.x VS javalin

https://vertx.io/

It's actively maintained with full time developers, performant, supports Kotlin out of the box, and has more features?

Hibernate Reactive integrates with Vert.x, but an extension allows to bridge to Project Reactor if wanted

Have you looked at Vert.x?

Explicitly so:

I really like Eclipse Vert.x... As both an Erlang dev and Java dev, it's a great synergy and soon to have support for Virtual Threads similar to BEAM.

There are many lean, popular, non-magical libraries in Java land. (https://quarkus.io/, https://vertx.io/, etc). Spring is a monster 😱. Its like comparing Kubernetes (written in Go) with some lean framework in another lang.

Eclipse Vert.x - Add amazing Async to any Java stack

Vert.X example: https://github.com/eclipse-vertx/vert.x/blob/master/src/main/java/examples/EventBusExamples.java#L106 (couldn't even find docs)

In fact, it builds on top of proven standards such as Eclipse MicroProfile or frameworks such as Vert.x or JAX‑RS.

If you've read this far, you might be interested to know that Javalin has been offering Brotli compression through jvm-brotli for three years already, and that there have been no (reported) issues. In other words, the effort required to release and maintain this is probably not huge.

I'm a big fan of Ktor (ktor.io) but another reasonable lightweight alternative is Javelin (https://javalin.io/). Heck even Spring Boot isn't that bad. HikariCP + JooQ (has both java and kotlin codegen) for DB access if you need and you're good to go.

A similar alternative that does not rely on web sockets is https://htmx.org. I have greatly enjoyed using it with some simpler web frameworks like https://javalin.io to do some prototyping and smaller projects. I'm sure if someone made a plug and play UI library like material UI for Angular on top of htmx you could absolutely fly through MVPs.

Javalin

If you're already familiar with most of the concepts around HTTP and web services, I'd recommend using something like https://javalin.io/ which is light weight frame work that makes getting something up and running quickly a very easy task.

I've been looking at https://javalin.io/ Seems close enough to express and some big names are using it, so I wouldn't say it's fizzling out

Javalin (https://javalin.io) is strongly inspired by Express and Koa, so you should feel right at home:

If you want to do a proper comparison between the two, I would be happy to help with code examples from Javalin's side. I could even host it on https://javalin.io as a "Comparison to Jooby" blog post.