Point taken on my rather glib final statement there. I deserved that..
I'll admit that my experience with Java web apps was never against bare JVMs, but against app servers (Liferay, etc). How common is it for people to roll their own no-framework bare web apps in Java?
Dropwizard and similar micro-frameworks are getting more popular. It's been several years since I ran a Java web application on an application server, and that was an application I was tasked with decommissioning.
In case you're not familiar with it, Dropwizard is a collection of libraries packaged up with some conventions and glue; it uses Jetty to serve HTTP and also integrates Jersey and Jackson (RESTful routing and JSON encoding) so that you don't have to do it yourself.
I'll admit that my experience with Java web apps was never against bare JVMs, but against app servers (Liferay, etc). How common is it for people to roll their own no-framework bare web apps in Java?