Parallel Universe made a comprehensive 3-part blog post to modern Java. They cover language features like lambdas, as well as notable libraries for build, deployment, monitoring, and web development.

http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2014/05/01/modern-java/

This is a good place to start: https://github.com/cxxr/better-java

So, is the idea to avoid ORM, JSF, JavaBeans, CDI Beans and all JavaEE in general? How is web application development done? I guess the back-end is made in Java with an API, and another language is used for the front-end.

Yeah we're using javascript with react/flux on the front end