Fair enough point about the breadth of the framework's services. Dropwizard and Finagle are small compared to Django. If you need specific features of Django, you may not find those in any JVM framework. I'm not certain.

But for many applications, the necessary framework pieces are there in many of the frameworks I listed: routing, database connection pooling, ORM, sessions, cookie support, form validation, JSON serialization, server-side templates, XSS/CSRF countermeasures, email, REST clients, authentication, etc. or some mix thereof. For example, Dropwizard provides a majority of those pieces.

Also agreed that you can write low-performance code on anything, and you're right there are several JVM libraries that perform poorly. But the JVM gives a very high "high water mark," so to speak. As do Go, Haskell, Lua, Erlang, and other platforms.

Dropwizard is a solid framework and would be my first choice for building web services. Recently it has acquired a few components that could work for putting together a user facing website (instead of just the web services it was designed for). Coupled with a JavaScript MVC framework this might even work for putting together a full featured user facing web application.

However, would you attempt to build a traditional multi-page web application (what Django is really built for) in Dropwizard? Is anyone doing that? I'd love to see some examples and patterns for doing that.