As I understand it Spring offers a complete enterprise application development framework, while DropWizard focuses on delivering production quality RESTful web services with minimal developer work. I've used Spring a little, it's nice... very full featured; in fact I still have production code using Spring's JDBC and LDAP libraries and Spring Security... they've worked out very well for me. I think Spring is the Rails to DropWizard's Sinatra. They're both very good, but if you need less and DropWizard can cover what you need it's a lot easier to use and probably uses the libraries you'd want to use anyway (unless you know a lot of Spring or JEE already).
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As I understand it Spring offers a complete enterprise application development framework, while DropWizard focuses on delivering production quality RESTful web services with minimal developer work. I've used Spring a little, it's nice... very full featured; in fact I still have production code using Spring's JDBC and LDAP libraries and Spring Security... they've worked out very well for me. I think Spring is the Rails to DropWizard's Sinatra. They're both very good, but if you need less and DropWizard can cover what you need it's a lot easier to use and probably uses the libraries you'd want to use anyway (unless you know a lot of Spring or JEE already).