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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

I second Play Framework. Have used it and Scala is a very nice language to learn. If I had invested in so much into the JVM, Play Framework would be it. But, if it's just a simple CRUD app, and if you had a choice, I'd recommend you to give Ruby on Rails a try. Hope this helps!

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I agree. And I'd add that the continuous compilation of the Play framework allows for a great, fast workflow. Even in combination with non-JVM compilation like for Typescript.

The last version comes with Slick integration which brings Ling-for-Sql style persistency to the JVM. In combination with support for Postgress JSON persistency that makes for a great fast prototyping stack.

I highly, highly recommend squeryl over slick. Much more readable as you're basically writing SQL in scala; you don't have to translate constantly between orm methods and SQL.

Agreed. Squeryl provides a really easy and intuitive API for querying and updating data. Slick seems to be less easy to use.

I second Squeryl over slick.Had a very nice experience.

+1 for Squeryl!!!

I agree with Play/Scala combination. Play is light enough for simple tasks, but at the same time it's a feature-complete powerful beast - built on Akka and capable of potentially handling millions of requests.

Scala and Play is a great choice. Another good Scala framework is Lift: http://liftweb.net/

If JVM is not a must, consider using Meteor.

+1 for Meteor. We've been using Meteor for about 8 months now and are amazed with the productivity and no-boilerplate code. To give some context, we were previously a JVM-only shop. In the past we've used Spring+Hibernate+GWT for one project, Ninja for another project, and a full blown custom stack + Dojo client side in a third project.

If JVM is your only choice because you want to connect to legacy Java API, consider wrapping the Java API with REST interfaces and use them with Meteor.

How do you find the GC/profile/coverage/tuning of the server side node process compared to the jvm?

TBH, we didn't have to do much performance tuning. The Meteor app we are building is heavy on the database CRUD (like real heavy) so there is not much to tune code-wise other than define good data structures for your db. And really, if you have to do any GC tune up for your node app, you really have to ask yourself if there's something you could do instead in your code first.

I must admit that initially it seemed that node js profiling sucks, but it's just that we are still not used to the internal intricacies of V8. When we did profile a couple of times (we use Webstorm so just used flag in the run config), there were too many things out of the context of our code showing up. I think if you show a snapshot of YourKit to someone who hasn't worked with JVM before they would have a similar reaction.

Lift works well but is utterly incomprehensible. Play is better written and maintained.

If you're looking for a Play-like framework but that's just Java, not Scala, you could check out Ninja Framework. I tried it for a simple CRUD app last year and it worked out pretty well. It's not as widely used or as maintained as Play though (+Play does have a Java API).

Glad to see support for Scala/Play sprinkled throughout the responses here. I love working with both. Now I'm considering taking the next step and adopting ScalaJS for some small internal apps.

I made the ScalaJS leap. Good for all my internal JS stuff. Interfacing with legacy JavaScript libs sucks (similar problems to using Typescript).

I don't agree because 1. Play!2.x is asynchronous, and you need to find NIO-compatible libraries, 2. I like Jersey for REST resources better than Play!2.x's "routes" file. I had to build a stack this year for an app which needed to share code with another Spring app. I've chosen DropWizard because I could share the Jersey resources and I didn't have to learn everything again.

You do not NEED to find NIO libraries. It sure helps, yes. But it comes with a wrapper of a webservice library, and slick does the RDBMS nicely (and offshoots like phantom to do cassandra, etc).

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