Groovy and Grails are still around but probably not as big a push anymore.

I would highly recommend JHipster to bootstrap a new Spring Boot app. It does monoliths or microservices and gives you a great scaffold to build on top of.

Spring Boot + Kotlin is a pretty sweet experience.

I bet. After doing the Kotlin Koans I'm itching to get away from Java.

There is a JHipster Kotlin blueprint that generates the backend code with Kotlin instead of Java. Can't wait to use it.

Iirc grails is built on top of Spring.

Absolutely! There's a big 4.0 release happening soon as well that includes micronaut integration. Furthermore, there are profiles you can start with today that let you create a react, angular, or vue SPA app powered by the grails back-end. Add the fact that it's a spring boot app as well and you get an incredible library of resources available to you. We've been running our app in production with relatively few developers.

> Absolutely! There's a big 4.0 release happening soon

Virtually no-one's updated from Grails version 2 to version 3, or released any plugins for version 3, so it's hard to believe anyone's interested in a 4.0 release.

The more modern take on it is micronaut [1]. It's a good fit if you are building a SPA + REST API style app, but want the plugin / addon style ecosystem of grails / rails.

[1] http://micronaut.io

I maintain a legacy Grails app, it's memory hungry and brittle. A bug one place brings down all parts of it.

I hate it but I'm no Java expert.