Internally, we wanted a way to build and deploy HTTP services quickly and easily. We wanted them to be asynchronous and we wanted a DSL that developers familiar with HTTP would pick up on quickly, without a lot of additional research. We've been having a lot of success with the composable Futures in Akka 2.0 and wanted to set developers up to leverage the full power of the Akka toolkit (and boy, is it powerful).

It's much lighter weight than play2 or play2-mini (https://github.com/typesafehub/play2-mini built on top of play2). , but does provide some similar functionality. There's definitely a whole lot less code in Smoke. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective.