Dropwizard has support for front-end development, but I think it really shines when developing RESTful API endpoints. You can use it to serve static assets, and those can be automatically "deployed" by refreshing the page, because Dropwizard just wires up Jetty to grab files off of the hard drive. If you want to use Freemaker/Mustache for views, I don't think it currently supports any "live" development.

It really works much better when creating a REST API for access by apps or separate front-ends (e.g. a JS SPA).

No, you still need something like JRebel for hot-reload of JVM classes. This framework is really designed for implementing REST APIs, it is not an MVC framework - even though it has support for serving pages using Mustache or freemarker.

Play framework handles this really nice without additional tools like Jrebel.

Its possible to use play framework in the same way as dropwizard is used, if you just ignore Plays server side scala templates.

Or you can take rapid application development in framework X out of the equation and use tools like JRebel.

I've tinkered around dropwizard and SBT with SBT-revolver, works like a charm.

most IDEs have support for this - you can change a method while debugging even and itll reset the stack with your changes. Theres also pro tools like jrebel that are supposed to solve it better than the built in stuff.

As long as you dont change any method signatures, sure. I think its the JVM that provides this as part of its remote debugging functionality.

If you change any signatures (should be most of the time) you need Jrebel.