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Comment by jebblue | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was a good presentation, the chart on frameworks around time 40:00 shows what I've been thinking, seeing. If I started a site today and I had full say, I wouldn't use Spring due to its complexity (although VMware people do make a fine product - for Enterprise stuff it makes sense); still it would probably be either Grails or Play. The problem I have with Play is that even their tutorial seems to me to try to brainwash you into getting into Scala, the templating system is based on Scala. That's where they lose me. Grails I've used to build a small test site and it was great. There, I made up my mind, I would use Grails.

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Views can all be straight html if you want them to be, and there are plenty of plugins for other types of templating. The Scala templates just attempt to leverage the language since you're using Scala with Play anyway (unless you're doing it with Java). The docs could use some love though.

FWIW, Even if you're using Play! from Java, the Scala compiler etc. are still being pulled in, even if it's just for compiling the routes file.

When I last looked at Play, it seemed the tooling wasn't there and not much IDE support. They tout that a simple text editor is plenty, but who wants to go without features like code completion? As I recall, the dynamic code generation made this unworkable in current IDEs.

I use Intellij IDEA on Scala / Play project and mostly happy with code completion for Scala code, refactorings, navigation, routes, view, jump to the views from controllers. It's not always perfect, but perfect enough for everyday use.

Yeah, I'm partial to NetBeans, but I tried IntelliJ, just for Play. Spent a few hours trying to get the integration working, but it just never did fully. For instance, it never picked up the Play libs and the dynamically generated code wasn't dynamically loaded by the debugger, etc. Maybe it was just something I was doing. But, after a while, when you're already unsure if you're going to like the framework, it's like, "nevermind. Back to work".

It's funny. To Java devs, code completion is fundamental (me included, to a certain degree). The idea of having to know all of the methods available on an instance and fully type everything out seems draconian. And yet, for the JavaScript and Ruby devs of the world hacking away in TextMate, auto-completion just isn't there (correct me if I'm wrong). But, they still manage to be productive. :)

Yeah, that's true. It seems a must when you are accustomed to having it. But code completion is just one example. There's refactoring, debugging, and other support that a text editor can't give you which has real impact on your productivity. Even organizing your various config files and providing a UI for modifying them is a convenience.

I remember some years ago doing a contract for a large company. I insisted that I was cool with just a text editor. But the client's dev lead insisted that I get with the IDE program because they were paying me hourly and wanted max productivity.

In the end, after making the switch, I had to agree.

Scala as template language is totally optional. There are severals options: http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.0.3/Modules

Thanks, actually I've waffled again, I'm still trying to make Play work for a test project on the side. It seems version 1 supported deployment to Tomcat but not 2. If I run Play as the server I guess it's not a big deal though.

> The problem I have with Play is that even their tutorial seems to me to try to brainwash you into getting into Scala

The problem with Grails is using Groovy is virtually mandatory. At least Play gives you a choice.

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