> If you want to stay at step 1 forever to keep things simple, groovy.
You can use Grails with Groovy to go to steps 2-5, tho all Grails does is use Spring which it bundles. In fact Grails started off as a thin wrapper around other software like Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate, and was really intended as a vehicle for its despot to muscle in on the consulting and conference markets for the bundled products, tho it's since grown its own codebase by signing up volunteers willing to sign the onerous VMWare contributors agreement signing away all copyright and patent claims over to VMWare.
You can use Grails with Groovy to go to steps 2-5, tho all Grails does is use Spring which it bundles. In fact Grails started off as a thin wrapper around other software like Groovy, Spring, and Hibernate, and was really intended as a vehicle for its despot to muscle in on the consulting and conference markets for the bundled products, tho it's since grown its own codebase by signing up volunteers willing to sign the onerous VMWare contributors agreement signing away all copyright and patent claims over to VMWare.