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Probably a new thing for Java

Not really. I don't see what features Play Framework has that are revolutionary or things that no other framework running on the JVM/Java wasn't able to do before.

"Rapid iteration" is the kind of "feature" that every framework claims to allow. No one advertises they allow "slow iteration".

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I believe The biggest differentiator in Play 2 is the reactive programming. Even if you look outside the JVM, NodeJS is the only other web framework providing that level of non-blocking http.

Rapid iteration is probably obvious for PHP, Rails or Django, but on the JVM (or .net), it's pretty rare to see a framework that really supports it well.

The JVM has plenty of non-blocking IO available - what do you think Play's support of it is built on top of? See Netty, for example.

Right, but that's what I like about Play. They took Netty, and they took Akka and all the other really nice reactive stuff and integrated it very cleanly.

With Akka you get most of the concurrency benefits you would get from a language like Erlang, but with the benefits of having access to the entire JVM ecosystem.

To be fair, if a framework was totally uninterested in fast iteration or couldn't even remotely claim it, then they would simply say nothing rather than offering "slow iteration".

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