I'm looking for alternatives for my team to create simple REST services which respond in JSON format to several clients. As far these services are developed on Spring MVC with Hibernate. It is a mandatory to connect and work with legacy databases (SQLServer, DB2 and MySQL - depends on project). Now I'm looking for alternatives to take the service development to a lighter approach. Don't get me wrong: Spring does a good job but sadly not everyone in our team is familiar with Spring even Hibernate. Addtion to this: In most cases not the full Spring stack is even needed. It would help also to get rid of the JVM too.
I was thinking of something script-like solution. Maybe PHP? Is there something like an ORM which could work on legacy DB systems? Same for Ruby on Rails.
Maybe there is something which I haven't heard of or come to now. I would love to hear you opinions or experiences whith other techniques.
Regards