Hacker News Reader

This vaguely reminds me of Play v1. It feels simple (err simpler) and not overly complicated like a typical Spring based app. Of course, this may change over time.

I really loved the Play v1.x framework minus the hard to debug part.

View on HN

The goal is to keep it simple and not support everything and the kitchen sink (like Spring Boot and the Spring ecosystem in general does).

Why was it hard to debug?

It's been a while, but if I remember correctly Play v1.x's 'magic' depended on Play v1 messing with Java bytecode. Well this in turn makes it harder to debug. This is no longer an issue with Play v2, but the magic (and the fun) are gone.

The reloading part of Play doesn't use bytecode manipulation, it simply creates a new classloader with the newly compiled stuff and then uses the new classloader on subsequent requests. There are other pieces of Play 1 & 2 that do bytecode manipulation. In Play 2 this is pretty minimal when using Java / EBean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com