One especially useful feature in Pyramid (and some other Python frameworks, Flask, Django etc) is the debug console, when I get an exception somewhere, then on the 500 page I can see the call stack and get a shell at each line in the calls stack, print the variables, view the last n requests, see the request variables and so on.
Really though, you should invest some time in learning typescript and react. These days most apps are just API calls on the back end and you deal with templating, forms, and other bs in the frontend.
Because most apps are built this way now, you won't find any "modern" Java frameworks that support what you want, and you're pretty much gonna be stuck with the older clunkier stuff.
The learning curve for new SPA frontend stuff is high but I've found it much more productive now that I'm into it. With HTML generated on the server it's too damn hard to get pages to do what you want
These days, i write most of my applications using the JDK's built-in web server. They're intended for internal use by single-digit numbers of people, and it works fine. It doesn't give you anything except the ability to serve HTTP, though.
Before that, i was writing apps using Spring Boot, which is a framework covering pretty much everything. It's easy to get started with, and requires no XML, but gets complicated fast as soon as you want to do anything even slightly unusual.
A more production-grade alternative to the built-in web server is Undertow, which again just does HTTP, but is fast and scalable, and fairly simple:
http://undertow.io/undertow-docs/undertow-docs-1.4.0/index.h...
Some people swear by Dropwizard as a more lightweight but still framework-sized alternative to Spring:
http://www.dropwizard.io/1.2.0/docs/getting-started.html
The tutorial there uses a smidgen of XML for Maven, but that's all. You can use Gradle instead of Maven, which lets you avoid XML and is generally much better, but you'd have to work that out yourself, or find someone else who has, perhaps this person:
http://automationrhapsody.com/build-dropwizard-project-gradl...
There's also Java EE, the 'offical' framework for Java. It's actually not bad to program with, but you need an application server to run your apps, and although those are miracles of engineering, the user experience is still stuck in the dark ages.
> Hearing things like "To test a bug I had to start 6 services on my computer and then I ran out of memory (computer had 16GB)" doesn't encourage me to try to do web dev in Java.
If you need to start six services, you must be doing some kind of microservice / SOA thing, and if you need >2 GB for each service, you must be using some very heavy-weight application server. Neither of those things are smart, and in combination, they're deadly!