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Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

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Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#11

Post by mcav »

jrockway wrote: post #3

Java has real lightweight threads, so what's the advantage of "shared nothing" here? Extra memory usage and less speed?

It seems to refer to this:

> "Play is designed to operate in a ‘share nothing’ architecture. The idea is to keep the application completely stateless. By doing this you will allow your application to run on as many server nodes as needed at the same time.

>What are the common traps you should avoid to keep the model stateless? Do not store any object on the Java heap for multiple requests"

If that's all they're talking about when they say "stateless", that's no different than a lot of other "stateless" MVC frameworks like Pylons, Django, Rails, etc.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#13

Post by patio11 »

falsestprophet wrote: post #4

What is the virtue of developing a web application in Java instead of a scripting language like Jython (aside from execution speed obviously)?

Well, at my day job, not having to throw out 10 years worth of legacy code would be considered "a bit of a plus". We also have 1,200 employees and precisely two engineers who have ever done a Rails application more complicated than the 15-minute-blog demo. I think we have one guy who coded a Python app once.

Our favorite contractors and outsourcing providers also have (comparatively speaking) deep skills in Java and the related stacks. Some of them have forgotten more than I ever want to know about, e.g., serializing Java beans.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#14

Post by ConceptDog »

jrockway wrote: post #3

Java has real lightweight threads, so what's the advantage of "shared nothing" here? Extra memory usage and less speed?

There's also the option to pack the entire solution into a WAR for deployment within a web app container. Tho the lightweight server is a cool approach.

I'd like to see the Play server support fcgi rather than having it deployed behind a webserver acting as a proxy for load balanced deployment.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#15

Post by ConceptDog »

rapind wrote: post #8
simonw wrote: post #2

I just ran through the tutorial and it was a real breath of fresh air - everything ran out of the box, there was no need for an IDE or a build process and changes were live the second I saved them from my editor (it apparently ships with the on-the-fly compiler from Eclipse). Really impressed.

Agreed. I still think it's a little cumbersome compared to rails, but it's definitely the best java web framework I've seen yet, and about as close to rails as you can probably get with java. Groovy for the template language is a good choice too. The example app was very useful. Including some real world jquery ajax functionality was a big bonus and a great way to compare functionality with other frameworks. (render…

Also agreed. Play is closer to what I was hoping Lift would end up being for Scala.

But with Scala support coming in Play 1.1, I'm officially excited.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#17

Post by kls »

"The Play framework makes it easier to build Web applications with Java"

Maybe you should not be building web applications with Java or C# or .

Maybe you should be building web services with these languages and using AJAX, a client side toolkit, Javscript, HTML and CSS to build a UI that communicates with said services.

Maybe this decouples your UI implementation from your business logic implementation so you can go mobile, IVR, Mind Jacking, without having to build the back end again.

Maybe server side templating was wrong and a CMS is your best choice for static templating. Given that assembling templates during run-time as opposed to build time seems to be a waste of resources. A CMS can deliver already templated, flat HTML files, to the web server during build time. As well Ajax is your best bet for delivering dynamic information.

It sure separates your concerns quite nicely, while allowing each developer to work in their domain of expertise.

Just a thought.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#18

Post by jriddycuz »

falsestprophet wrote: post #4

What is the virtue of developing a web application in Java instead of a scripting language like Jython (aside from execution speed obviously)?

If you have developers that know Java and nothing else, which is not all that uncommon, it's really your only option. And since any developer who can't or won't learn additional languages is probably not very good, using a language like Java provides the fluff and bloat necessary to keep these untalented devs from screwing too many things up. Java's primary advantage in general is interchangeability of engineers.

If you have developers that know other JVM languages, or who can learn, then I would say there is no advantage because any language on the JVM can refer to object built in any other. This is why things like Jython, JRuby, Rhino, and Clojure are cool.

Re: Play framework for Java - a radical rethink of Java web app development?

#20

Post by fortybillion »

turtle4 wrote: post #10
c00p3r wrote: post #5

Let me guess - it's yet another Java on Rails?

Seems that way, although it was the most thorough that I've seen. What are others? Groovy runs on JVM, Wicket on Wings exists, I believe. What are other Java options?

We've been using Grails (Groovy) at our startup with great success. A few warts early on with regard to how Grails wants to handle packages and URLs, but we push a lot of transactions through this system (sorry, I don't have exact numbers) and Grails has held up remarkably well. It also cut our initial development time by about half.
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