Ok. I agree vert.x and quarkus.io really look promising! I was using the play framework which looked similar at first glance and then was horrible as java was just at the surface and one needed to use scala in the end. Learning scala with a java team under time preasure was not a good experience...
I did Play v2 with Scala... I can agree, it was not pleasant. (I had just gotten off a year-long Ruby on Rails/ JRuby on JVM stint though - so "pleasant" is a relative term)
