I agree completely. For a long time I was avoiding Spring because bloat and XML, but then I finally gave in and tried Spring Boot. It is most excellent. Nearly all bloat is opt-in, it does everything, and absolutely zero XML configuration needed. I've tried Dropwizard before, and use it for two applications I have running. It works, but it's not great (because it's not just a rest API, but also has GUI and user management). I'll be porting it to Spring eventually.