To start with you can go for Spring MVC because of its simplified injection of data through POJOs, loose coupling between modules and the ease of use of dependency injection.

Also, you can go for Hibernate which is DB independent i.e; you can communicate with any DB with small alterations in your code. Its learning curve is short.

Both have good demands in IT industry. Happy learning :)

I'd suggest you to go with Spring Boot, but with the kind of the concept you have, if I were you, I'd pick Vert.x. It is event-driven and non-blocking and good to develop reactive applications. Give Vert.x+Java a try and you may like it.

If you raise your eyebrow and nod your head in disappointment, pick up Spring Boot and kickstart your project.

Spring boot is used a lot by companies and can be a good start

Thanks for the replies, Spring Boot was mentioned several times and seems like it may be what I'm looking for, but I'm curious about Vert.x too. To give a little more info on what I'm trying to achieve:

If any of you have a Steam wishlist that's pretty similar, except I want people to be able to have as many lists as they want and be able to name them whatever they like. For a few examples I'm thinking lists like "Now playing", "must-get", "Favorite NES games", "PC Collection" or "Top 10 of 2017".

Also, there's no way I'll be able to add all 4 trillion games that exist all by myself so I'm wanting to crowd source that bit. I'll need people to be able to log in and add games themselves if they don't already exist in the database. So if you find yourself making a "Favorite Arcade Games" list and Pacman isn't on the site yet, you can add it to the site yourself and then once it goes live, add it to your list.