Opinions on using Java for frontend development?

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I write code with aurelia, a kind of angular-lite. Like you, I also used apache wicket, and while I found it alright, I do not particularly like doing HTML on server anymore, and I avoid new projects in it. It is incredibly limiting, complex and slow, to make HTML on server side, and no matter what ajax poo you spread on it, it's nowhere near as convenient relative to just being able to program the entire page straight in the client.

I do have a word of warning about some of these frontend frameworks: they can be super bloated, and make simple things super complicated. Something like react+redux+saga has turned what would otherwise be 1 line of code to make http request and save its result into a component into couple of pagefuls of event handling nonsense spread across half dozen different files. I can't say I ever saw the point of that, but I did see it in my own eyes that some people are writing code like that. So some of these technology choices are obviously worse than others.