Agreed - I think most programming language communities have settled on one major framework (though there are plenty of other smaller ones) and they've survived.

Spring: June 2003

Rails: August 2004

Django: July 2005

Symfony: October 2005

Symfony is actually more like several different frameworks under the same name. Some of our projects are stuck with Symfony 1 and upgrading them to the latest version is aking to switching the frameworks because they have almost nothing in common.

Many don’t survive. You mentioned Symfony, Zend used to be equally popular. Not many people use it now.

Oh I agree - 15 years ago picking a web framework would have been much more difficult - for web frameworks now though I think that using the most popular choice should be quite safe.

Likely lockins.

Spring is bloated as hell, last I tried it took full minutes to startup a server on default settings. This kills iteration speeds for fresh projects.

I don't have that experience. I have personally run many different services, and most of them starts in seconds. The exceptions are usually those that start some process at startup (like syncing jobs, leader elections, database migrations, waiting for database locks etc.), but that is not something specific to Spring.

I'm not a java developer so I don't pay much attention to spring.

But I think the overarching point also includes versioning. For example, asp.net 1 app will still run today just fine, not so for many of these frameworks. RoR, Laravel, et al, all become a rat wheel of upgrading every 1-2 years.

It's a problem.

Contrast that with CakePHP which is still supporting CakePHP2 (I think, it's EoL is coming up soon though) over many many years. I do worry they're increasing their cadence and becoming like most other frameworks in this regard, so I may have to stop praising them for their attitude for support of older versions.