FWIW, the SPR-9888 JIRA issue [1], which prompted the creation of Spring Boot and is quoted in the article, actually names Dropwizard as an inspiration.

The article quotes:

"I think that Spring's web application architecture can be significantly simplified if it were to provided tools and a reference architecture that leveraged the Spring component and configuration model from top to bottom. Embedding and unifying the configuration of those common web container services within a Spring Container bootstrapped from a simple main() method."

The very next lines are:

"Though there are many frameworks and platforms today that no longer require a container I think inspiration can be drawn most from DropWizard (http://dropwizard.codahale.com/).

Another project I've seen inspired by DropWizard but leveraging Spring is HalfPipe (https://github.com/32degrees/halfpipe). Though I don't think HalfPipe goes far enough. I think to truly provide simplification the entire architecture, wherever reasonable, must be embedded within the Spring container rather than without. Though it does have several other interesting ideas."

[1] https://jira.spring.io/browse/SPR-9888

I know my comment here isn't adding much -- but that is awesome.

I too felt that Spring Boot was a response to the simplicity of Dropwizard. I worked at a place which had two opposing java camps. One was heavily into Spring Boot, the other, Dropwizard. This might not be a fair representation of Spring Boot, but unfortunately our Spring Boot crowd were card-carrying Spring-for-everything people who would over-engineer their systems to the point where a simple REST API would have thousands of lines of code, magic everywhere, mediocre performance, and present a nightmare learning curve for new engineers. The Dropwizard-based systems were far less magical and much easier to understand. Maybe Spring Boot can be just as nice, if the right people use it?

Absolutely. It makes me laugh when the article says spring boot is opinionated - for dropwizard that meant picking the best tool for the job, for spring boot it seems to mean picking the spring tool for the job. I guess that's just the way the spring ecosystem is, but as a philosophy it's not one I'd be proudly stating.

I've heard multiple origin stories -- one is the issue linked in the article. Another was that Dave Syer worked on a Rails project briefly and thought "oh, this isn't so bad".

Spring is a team of fairly smart individuals who tinker with experimental stuff all the time, so I would not at all be surprised if Dropwizard didn't figure amongst the inspirations. And they do keep up with what other folks are doing, so good ideas tend to be adopted into Spring pretty frequently.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, but not on Spring.

Would you use dw or spring boot now? Our current stack is dropwizard but I've never messed around with slring boot

I would definitely use Spring Boot now. It definitely has parity in my view. The simplicity is there too, so for example if you still like DW metrics you can pull those in easily. You also get the other Spring things for free, like Spring Batch which I think is another good piece of software from Spring.