How to Be Productive With the Java Ecosystem

I'm pretty happy with the state of the developer tooling side of the Java ecosystem. If you want to be in the annotation based world, like spring boot is just great. Alternatives to that would be micro knot or quercus. Micronaut may be a better option than spring boot. All of them work great with Kotlin. And there's something called spring boot or Quercus which has built-in native support. But there are challenges with that and I've run into all sorts of insurmountable hurdles with that.