Why I'm Moving Away from the Play Framework

I'm finding some things are a bit awkward, particularly around templates and routing. Also, the documentation while good is lacking in other parts.

Play is a very prescriptive framework but only on a couple of choices do I have an issue.

The first is about transactions. Each HTTP request is a transaction. Generally I'm fine with this but you need a way to override or control this (IMHO).

Second, I like the mixin approach with controllers (@With(...)). I wish there were something similar with models.

Third, and this is the biggest, it doesn't integrate with Maven, which is something I'm very tempted to fork it for. There's no reason it can't be a Maven plugin/archetype, use Maven for dependencies (directly, rather than tortuous syntax in dependencies.yml), etc. Some guy has an alpha version of something like this already when I last looked.

Fourth, while I don't necessarily mind that controllers are static (as a way of indicating they're stateless it seems), that's actually an issue for parallellizing tests.

Play 2.0 is moving even further away from this and using SBT, which I've never used but heard mixed things about.

I can't speak to many of the specifics of this post (eg I only use Play on Linux).

Whatever (valid) criticisms you can level against Play I'd still far and away prefer to use it over any other Java Web framework I have used or know about.

While I understand they need a web framework in their stack, and Play is more RoR-ish than Lift (which makes it more marketable I think), I dunno, some of the gymnastics Play 1.x used to pull off its magic seemed a little over the top to me.

Like using bytecode rewriting to add language-level features like properties. Yes, Java sucks, but we who use it understand that and accept its imperfections. I'd rather fix Java proper (or use Scala) than have a web framework think that it's their job to somehow fix a lackluster language.

Just seems like it'd lead to a lot of bloat/code in the framework that isn't "just serve this webapp as simply as possible".

That being said, what Play got right did look really awesome (the compilation error reporting in particular).

Anyway, will be interesting to see what the Play 2.x release will look like, given it looks like Typesafe is having some amount of involvement in it?

Fair enough, but I wouldn't switch to an inferior framework over it.

I'd still only choose it if I had to use Java though.

If you can roll with Django you can roll with Play. Although, I always prefer a python microframework such as flask nowadays.

I also see how Play is now part of typesafe, so that could get better or worse, but it is the right direction for Java web apps to go.

The author wrote the Play Framework Cookbook and so it's a presentation from someone that can be considered a bit of an authority on Play (and not someone with an axe to grind). However, the presentation covers a bit of what worries me about Play. Play rewrites the bytecode for things like emulating properties and allowing you to pass whatever you want to the templates and have it automatically name the variables based on their local names in the calling method.

For me, the reason to use Java over Python or Ruby would be to move away from some of the behavior used in those languages that can make debugging and static analysis harder.

I've used Play for some hobby stuff (and kept up on Play 2.0). Play 2.0 seems to remove the former system for passing variables to the templates in favor of a system where templates accept certain parameters with types (a welcome change for me). However, at least the last time I played with it, Eclipse couldn't tell me what variables and types the template was expecting.

I guess Play leaves me feeling like it brings the magic to me without as much ease that Python and Ruby offer (or, at least, without as much familiarity). That might be changing - I think that the changes in the templating for 2.0 show a clear move in that direction. I really wish them well since it's always good to have more good options for development and there's a lot of Java already out there to leverage.

I maybe be misunderstanding her first point, but I am currently running individual unit tests in IntelliJ for one of my play apps on 1.2.4...

I can't speak to her other issues, I've never run in to them.

For what it's worth, I've been developing a Play (now 1.2.4) app for a year now and it's been a blast. Sometimes you can see the framework's immaturity, but I haven't run into any showstoppers like the author.

From the post I understood that she was pissed because they did not accept her fix on testing the app from the IDE.

The second point was that there is a bug in the framework that they could not find... it seems though as the bug is in their application. (concurrent modification of a Map is a problem in java not Play!)

It's a pity to give up such a great framework for silly reasons.

Every time I have to switch to another framework (especially jsf) I want to shoot myself.

Anyway... good luck finding another good java framework.

http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.0/templates#Act... and http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.0/routes#revers...

Are there other play-like frameworks for java?

But the disparity between what web frameworks actually do for me in any particular application and the amount of layers and dependencies they introduce boggles my mind.

[Edit] If you use maven try mvn dependency:tree

OP is looking for a silver bullet and there ain't one. Play! is an open source project, so the developers didn't have time to deal with his patch and he got upset. People forgot OS devs don't get paid for their work. Be a little bit more appreciative.