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Comment by joshlemer | Hacker News Reader

> Scala Play webapp

I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10 or 12 years ago, Play had a lot of energy and momentum, and it's a kind of thing that has broad enterprise/start up appeal. But focus was always more on Akka and what seemed like really niche architecture astronaut stuff like Actors and Actor System Clusters and Event Sourcing etc, rather than getting the basics to be super ergonomic or productive.

If they had keep just making Play Framework better and better and focusing on the practical problems that every web service faces, they could be in a similar great position as Laravel is in today or any of the many Rails/Laravel consultancies.

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> I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10 or 12 years ago, Play had a lot of energy and momentum, and it's a kind of thing that has broad enterprise/start up appeal. But focus was always more on Akka and what seemed like really niche architecture astronaut stuff like Actors and Actor System Clusters and Event Sourcing etc, rather than getting the basics to be super ergonomic or productive.

I'd say the opposite. They pushed Play a lot. But it was never a killer app, and it never even really leveraged the strengths of Scala.

People and especially companies don't switch languages for "super ergonomic and productive". They switch because they want to do something they can't do in their current language. I'm not a fan of Akka or Actors, but it made for some incredible demos that you really couldn't do in anything else except Erlang.

That is correct.

Play's hype did more harm than good. I work at a company that has many legacy projects in Scala because we were/are heavily invested in Spark, and Play is a disaster overall.

What is so bad specifically about play?

I use Play, and I think it is a good web framework, nowadays.

In the past, however, upgrading to new versions, was annoying, because of pretty big changes in the API. (Don't know if this is what GP had in mind though.)

And even worse (I suppose) for people who were using the different ORMs which have come and gone, instead of plain SQL.

Akka has been annoying too: Adding WebSocket to my project, using Akka, was extremely much more complicated than doing the same in Nodejs (at least looking at the Nodejs docs I've seen).

Today, to me, Play is feature complete and all I want is maintenance updates (and performance optimizations but not so important). And yes, that's how things look right now: Some bigger companies pay an open-source maintainer, so Play gets regular maintenance updates, but not any annoying major API changes (or so I hope), nice.

Play has become boring in a good way? :- ) (Thinking about some "Use boring tech" HN posts.)

Like KajMagnus mentioned:

- The churn caused by breaking changes in minor versions used to be annoyingly high.

- Slick looks neat at first but caused a lot of friction when used by less experienced developers.

- The fact Akka is in your dependency tree encourages people to reach for it and raw actors are usually a bad choice. Akka streams work well for websockets and SSE but it's another footgun.

Additionally:

- It was in state of semi-abandonment for several years before Lightbend gave the project to the community. Even though there are/were big companies deploying Play apps at scale, for instance Apple.

- The introduction of Guice (in 2.4 afaik) was a terrible mistake, completely unnecessary and at odds with the Scala philosophy. Sure you can not use it, or use something else (like macwire) but defaults matter.

- Play-JSON depends on Jackson which is annoying in the JVM world, causing binary compatibility issues when you have diamond dependencies.

- Standard library Futures are not so nice when you've experienced anything else (Scalaz Task, Cats IO, ZIO, even Twitter Future...)

- Code generation from routes files is an odd choice when Scala has always been expressive and DSL friendly.

- Swagger/OpenAPI integration is brittle.

I've personally used Tapir since 2019 and couldn't be happier. All Play apps still running at my company are being abandoned or replaced by Spring/Java projects.

Tapir looks nice, didn't know about. Can I ask, do you use it together with Netty? How fast is it for you? (if you happen to have benchmarked it)

Have you tried Vertx with Scala? (Or Spring + Scala, or sth else?)

> The introduction of Guice

Personally I've wired everything statically at compile time, zero dependency injections. (Felt as if what I did went a tiny bit against the framework, but works fine.)

I use Tapir with http4s as the http server isn't my bottleneck anyway and I like Cats Effect and fs2.

But SoftwareMill has done extensive benchmarking to make sure the overhead from Tapir vs calling the http backend directly was insignifiant. I believe Netty is the recommended backend if you want direct style (i.e no effect systems) on Java 21+ virtual threads even though Oracle's Helidon Níma is supported too.

Thanks! Ok, seems direct style is what I would want, after having asked an LLM: it says it's then simpler to debug async call stacks, with Java 21+ virtual threads.

Nice to know that there are good alternatives, if time it is some day to migrate away from Play.

> Slick

Totally agreed, Slick is definitely not a good way to access the database. It massively over complicates things and was a massive oil spill that destroyed the maintainability of many codebases. But that's not really Play, specifically, just a library that lots of people used with Play. I personally was always more a fan of https://scalikejdbc.org/, if not just plain JDBC

> It was in state of semi-abandonment for several years

Yes, this is my main complaint. I remember on the front page for like 5 years after TypeSafe Activator had been totally removed from the internet, the Play website was still showing Activator commands. To this day, the Play site still hasn't removed their line about how they support CoffeeScript and Less.

> Guice (in 2.4 afaik) was a terrible mistake, completely unnecessary and at odds with the Scala philosophy > Play-JSON depends on Jackson > Standard library Futures are not so nice

Well, it turned out that the Scala Philosophy wasn't the be-all and end-all anyways, and was always changing (at some point DSL's were in, then they were out. The way people encode TypeClasses changed over the years, selectDynamic/applyDynamic were in and then they were out, symbols were everywhere and then deprecated, implicit conversions were in and then "best practice" switched to Converters) and there was always at least 2 camps who had very different philosophies. Guice is probably the most popular DI tool in the JVM world so seems to make sense to use it.

The Jackson dependency and Scala Future's shortcomings might be annoying to many, but I don't think they really hindered adoption. Even in your case, what happened? At your company they're ripping out Play and replacing it with Spring, which uses DI very similar to Guice, probably depending on Jackson, and using java Futures (if they're doing async at all).

It's true some Scala features or patterns fell out of fashion but I don't recall any time where replacing compile-time logic with annotation based runtime reflection was considered a good idea. And I don't think Guice was ever the most popular JSR-330 implementation, at least not when Play started using it. Spring had been dominating the Java world for several years by then. Funnily enough in the Android world I remember Dagger being very popular exactly around that time as people figured compile-time automatic DI is a lot saner than Guice.

Of course Spring is another can of worms entirely and I find many aspects infuriating. But things like diamond dependencies are less of an issue thanks to Maven BOMs which are common in the ecosystem.

My point is that ~10 years ago people started using Spark at my company, got curious about Scala and thought Play was compelling. Nowadays Spark (in Scala) is less ubiquitous and these teams remember that so many people got burned by Play before.

Funnily enough the peak of Scala's hype which I believe plateaued between 2014 and 2019 before dropping sharply was mainly driven by:

Spark: ground breaking in many ways but has become a huge liability to the ecosystem, holding so many libraries back. Databricks is also the main financial contributor to the Scala Center (I believe) while not giving much of a damn about the community or Scala 3 altogether. Spark is a very frustrating piece of software overall and today 95% of users are in PySpark anyway, avoiding JVM dependency hell being one reason.

Play: good idea, questionable execution, poor governance, and today mostly irrelevant to the future of Scala. Props to community maintainers who managed to secure funding and brought the framework back from the dead, saving many projects from a certain death.

Akka: also ground breaking, pretty much the only game in town if you need stateful cluster sharding, deployed at scale by top-tier companies. But also overkill for most people, and on top of that the relicensing really hurt the community and broke trust.

The boons and banes of Scala.

I disagree, productivity and ergonomics drives plenty of popular tools - React, Laravel, Rails, React Native, etc.

Yeah, but I don't think Play (which I enjoyed) was ever going to top those, unless it had a fundamentally new idea to bring.

Laravel and Django didn't bring fundamentally new ideas above and beyond Rails.

Hmm. Fair point for Rails and Laravel (whereas I think React had a killer app in terms of being able to make SPAs without going crazy) but those are tools that you can pick up for a one-off throwaway project - indeed I suspect most adopters didn't "move" to them so much as start doing projects in them and eventually stop doing projects in other things. Scala was never really competing in that space - I don't think anyone would ever say "let's make our website for the next tradeshow in Play" - it's a "heavy" language that needs an IDE and deep familiarity to get the best out of it (and partly that's also what JVM folks would be expecting). So it needed to play for the big core codebases, and for a while it did (particularly when there was no alternative to Spark).

Could they have made Play an alternative to Rails for one-off throwaway websites? Maybe, but the thing that would have needed to be different wouldn't be pushing Play itself, but rather lighter tooling and making it easier to get from zero to pages being served. Honestly I struggle to see how they could've done it without making the compiler and build tool much faster, and either making the IDEs much more efficient (difficult) or making the language easier without an IDE (difficult, and would risk splitting efforts). And even then, you wouldn't really show the compelling advantage of Scala, which is fearless refactoring in large codebases. I don't know that it could ever have been better than Rails at what Rails does, and also we already have Rails. Whereas even if it eventually "dies", Scala has already pushed Java and Kotlin to be much better than they were.

I mean, I don't find that working with IntelliJ makes it any "heavier" than other languages in terms of prototyping. I use PHP Storm for Laravel development and I never say to my self, "if only I wasn't using an IDE, maybe I could get this site put together faster". Quite the opposite, Intellij makes me super productive.

I think all of these frameworks - Laravel, Rails, Django, Next.js, Spring - require deep familiarity to get the best out of them.

> Honestly I struggle to see how they could've done it without making the compiler and build tool much faster

Well, Lightbend literally was the owner of Play, SBT, and Scalac. They were in a perfect position to make the build tool and compiler much faster. Or even if SBT can't be made much faster, ditch it and make integration with gradle and/or maven really great.

> I use PHP Storm for Laravel development and I never say to my self, "if only I wasn't using an IDE, maybe I could get this site put together faster". Quite the opposite, Intellij makes me super productive.

But the first time you tried out PHP, did you have to install the IDE first? Did you have to change your existing PHP tooling setup the first time you tried out Lavarel?

I would agree that IDEs are an improvement over not using them in most languages, but my feeling the "tooling curve" is much steeper for Scala than for something like PHP.

Totally agree. I wrote a few Play apps way back when and really enjoyed it. I was so excited about the future of the framework and how it would beat out Java for web apps, and steal folks away from the Rails ecosystem.

And then it just…stopped. Not sure what happened there honestly.

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