For me I've found I only need a few things to get started. One is the JDK, obviously. Another is Maven. It downloads dependencies for you and is pretty standard (there's also Gradle which some projects use). Finally there is IntelliJ for development. That's about it. Pretty much everything else can be downloaded and installed automatically be Maven or your IDE.

For web development, I've found Ninja Framework to be quite nice. The documentation is very good. The biggest problem is that it tends to delegate to lots of other libraries for functionality, and often those libraries have been around a long time and in some semi-standardised state that can be horrifically confusing (e.g. Hibernate). The Java world REALLY likes to take good open source libraries and then copy their interfaces into standards that other products can then implement. This sounds great in theory, and I'm sure some people do benefit from that, but it makes learning this stuff a giant PITA because the documentation for everything always has five versions, four implementations and every annotation or API has two identical versions in different namespaces, only one of which will actually work. Argghhhhh.

However if you do make it past this swamp, then the tools themselves are actually rather powerful and performant.