Are you only looking for people with prior Django experience? People who know Python and the web can pick it up pretty quickly. And I would have thought that Python knowledge is common now.

Spring Boot is pretty good actually. It doesn’t match some of Django’s features, but if I were to use JVM now, either Spring Boot or a standard Clojure stack with Ring (coupled with Honeywell) would be good enough. (Of course finding Clojure devs is harder, I have spent a lot of time evangelizing it in my country with little success.) I have used both last year in production without issues.

Still, Django and Rails makes many things a breeze.

What is Honeywell?

I meant honeysql, but iPhone corrected it. :)

https://github.com/jkk/honeysql/blob/master/README.md

Play framework (with Slick or Quill for data access) can get you most of the way there, but you won't have Django's out-of-the-box admin interface, have to roll your own.

If you add in Akka or Akka Typed then you can pass state changes for connected websocket clients (i.e. for a SPA/Redux based frontend), which is quite awesome.

Scala and Scala.js are a powerful combination if you want to do everything in the same language. Performance is of course excellent compared to most of the dynamic language backed frameworks, and static typing is a huge win...for some of us at any rate :)

Will have to get your hands dirty to replicate Django, however.

I'm a JVM fan, but I've never been able to find good tutorials on documentation on play. It seems like everytime I find a resource its for some old version that isn't compatible.

Do you have any recommendations?

Well, start with the play docs [1]; from there, yeah, you have to hunt around. Play's more of a framework for building frameworks than an out-of-the-box batteries included web framework like Rails, Django, etc. It provides the building blocks to create anything, the rest is up to you.

When I was learning Play I found digging through the sources to be immensely useful, not only for learning the framework itself, but for learning Scala as well.

[1] https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.6.x/ScalaHome

Flipping your problem around, is it hard to find developers who can be productive in Django/Python?

I don't know. It's a question with all kinds of sub-questions:

- Is your expectation that any Django/Python developer will be immediately productive in your specific Django app? If not, how much ramp-up would you expect? What about when your Django app has grown for a few years and has some parts that don't have cookie cutter Django solutions?

- Are you building a team or hiring contractors? In the former case, are you planning to only hire seasoned experts? If not, how this your team members learn new things? How will you keep them growing and interested?

What features from Django are you missing and in which frameworks? Comparing Django(admittedly, from few years ago when I worked with it) with Spring, I'd say the latter is more feature-rich and way more customizable because of its modular design. Unfortunately, it's also much more complex and setting up a new project properly with all can be overwhelming so if you want to play around with it I'd recommend to start with JHipster template - it generates a React/Angular SPA with backend in Spring.

Spring Boot is a good start and easy to evolve into custom assembly of the frameworks and libraries which compose it. Java ecosystem is still more mature and functional than anything else, so I‘m even wondering what’s there in Django, that doesn’t exist on Java platform?

Have you looked at dropwizard?

It's more of a collection of libraries than a big framework but it's quite ok if you're building microservices.

I found http://www.sparkjava.com to be better than Play framework personally if you want to work with Java. Play seems to be more Scala focussed when I tried it.

It’s rather minimal though, just providing the HTTP stack for you, so you have to do your own DB connections and the like.

Where are you looking for Python engineers? I'm surprised you're having trouble finding them, the language and ecosystem seems like it's thriving and more popular than ever.