For people whose impression of Spring and Hibernate was formed a decade ago, its really worth another look now. You can completely manage them with annotations in your code and lots of the boilerplate will be generated for you based on naming conventions.
JHipster (https://jhipster.github.io/) provides a Yeoman generator to make a basic project template as well as generate entities and screens using an Angular, Spring Boot & Hibernate stack which makes it super easy to get started with all of these components.
An open source alternative to JRebel is https://github.com/dcevm/dcevm - it works great with Java 8, Intellij, Spring & Hibernate.
Actually the example I was thinking of is the finder methods which require only an interface definition conforming to a naming convention. Bytecode is generated at runtime - there is no generated source to manage.
Not much of what Jhipster generates could be considered boilerplate - the application code is pretty DRY. I've used Rails off and on since 2005 and it is fairly comparable in that respect at this point though Java is more verbose of course.
It's difficult to take Spring seriously after trying Jersey. Resource traversal is a powerful concept. Also, recent or not, Spring still comes with way too much complexity and magic. I'd really go for something more Sinatra/Flask-like. Haven't tried Dropwizard, but from what I saw it looks a lot more sane.
> It's difficult to take Spring seriously after trying Jersey
I'm using Spring Data REST at work. We have a dozen endpoints. We've had to write code for one of them.
The rest were generated by introspecting our models. Complete with HATEOAS links, sorting, searching, paging and HAL. It made a whole bunch of work simply disappear -- even compared to Rails.
JHipster (https://jhipster.github.io/) provides a Yeoman generator to make a basic project template as well as generate entities and screens using an Angular, Spring Boot & Hibernate stack which makes it super easy to get started with all of these components.
An open source alternative to JRebel is https://github.com/dcevm/dcevm - it works great with Java 8, Intellij, Spring & Hibernate.