Leading Java Frameworks for Web Development: A Ranking of the Most Widely Used
In the dynamic world of web development, Java continues to hold a significant position, powering numerous applications for various industries. Here's a look at some of the most popular Java frameworks for web development in 2025 and their key features.
Spring and Spring Boot
Spring, along with Spring Boot, is a dominant choice for building scalable, maintainable, and enterprise-grade web applications. With annotation-based dependency injection, REST controllers, and request handlers, Spring MVC offers HTTP routing and REST APIs. Spring WebFlux provides support for reactive, non-blocking apps, while Spring Boot removes boilerplate configuration with sensible defaults [1][5].
Hibernate
Hibernate, an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, simplifies database interactions with Java objects. It supports complex queries and transactions, making it a popular choice for the database management and persistence layer in web apps [2][3][5].
Apache Struts
Apache Struts, with its MVC architecture, separates Model, View, and Controller. It offers AJAX, REST, and JSON support and simplifies rapid development. Struts 2 introduces flexible configuration with annotations [3].
Micronaut
Micronaut, a lightweight JVM framework, is designed for microservices and serverless apps. It boasts fast startup and low memory overhead, making it suitable for cloud-native apps [1][5].
Play Framework
Play Framework is known for its reactive and scalable non-blocking I/O. It supports both Scala and Java and offers asynchronous processing for high concurrency [2].
Vaadin
Vaadin is a Java-centric rich UI framework that allows building modern web interfaces with Java. It offers a component-based web UI development approach [2][3].
Dropwizard
Dropwizard is a lightweight framework for REST APIs. It combines Jetty, Jackson, and Jersey and focuses on quick, production-ready microservices [2][3].
Grails
Grails is a rapid CRUD application development framework that leverages Groovy on JVM. It follows the convention over configuration approach [2][3].
Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
GWT translates Java code to JavaScript, enabling rich front-end development in Java. It supports building complex browser apps [2][3].
In conclusion, among these frameworks, Spring (with Spring Boot) remains the dominant choice due to its comprehensive ecosystem, extensive features, and maturity [1][5]. Frameworks like Micronaut and Play gain popularity for cloud-native and reactive apps, while Hibernate is widely used for database persistence. Apache Struts remains relevant in enterprise environments that prefer traditional MVC separation with robust AJAX and REST support [3]. This diversity allows developers to pick frameworks suited to specific application needs, from lightweight microservices to rich interactive UIs.
Note: This summary is based on multiple 2025 sources highlighting the current trends and features in Java web frameworks [1][2][3][5].
Stack technology, such as Spring and Spring Boot, remains popular for building scalable web applications due to their comprehensive ecosystem and annotation-based dependency injection. On the other hand, Trie technology is notably absent in this discussion of Java frameworks for web development in 2025.
