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What’s new in Play 2.2

playframework.com

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Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#21

Post by nek4life »

stingraycharles wrote: post #17
saryant wrote: post #2

We're using Play pretty heavily at our startup though not for our customer-facing frontend, that's still in Rails. What we love about Play: * Async everything, especially the web service library * JSON macros * Scala-based templates * Integration with Akka * Support for server-sent events (we use this for cluster monitoring) What we wish was better: * JSON deserialization performance isn't as good as raw Jackson yet.…

What I never understood is why they embrace rendering templates at the server. Is it simply a matter of "because we can and it's nice for the people that want to use it", or is there a real real reason why pushing raw HTML via AJAX request is better? I always thought the status quo in the web development world was to use a framework like Backbone.JS to communicate with your backend and use a client-side template engi…

If you have an application that doesn't need to be indexed by search engines, yes. If you have a content heavy website the preferable method is still to render templates on the server. It still varies depending on your use case. I wouldn't say that is the status quo at all.

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#22

Post by vassvdm »

russ519 wrote: post #3

For those that have some experience using Play with both Java and Scala, which Play variant do you enjoy working with the most? It sounds like there are some API difference between the Java and Scala versions and I'm curious whether those differences are a factor in deciding whether to go Java or Scala with Play. I'm a long time Java developer, envious of Ruby, interested in Scala for its potential in being a hybrid…

BTW if you're interested, Martin Odersky and others will host a brand new Coursera class focusing on Reactive programming starting in November:

https://www.coursera.org/course/reactive

It doesn't say so explicitly in the course description, but I guess we will be using Play and Akka during assignments. If it's half as good as his introduction to Functional Programming in Scala, it will be a treat.

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#23

Post by virtualwhys »

stingraycharles wrote: post #17
saryant wrote: post #2

We're using Play pretty heavily at our startup though not for our customer-facing frontend, that's still in Rails. What we love about Play: * Async everything, especially the web service library * JSON macros * Scala-based templates * Integration with Akka * Support for server-sent events (we use this for cluster monitoring) What we wish was better: * JSON deserialization performance isn't as good as raw Jackson yet.…

What I never understood is why they embrace rendering templates at the server. Is it simply a matter of "because we can and it's nice for the people that want to use it", or is there a real real reason why pushing raw HTML via AJAX request is better? I always thought the status quo in the web development world was to use a framework like Backbone.JS to communicate with your backend and use a client-side template engi…

I don't know, maybe type safety?

Don't forget about Play's truly excellent form generation/validation, and yes, raw speed of jvm byte code.

Rails truly (DHH) made a blog post on why they switched to generating html server-side: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#24

Post by sukaka »

russ519 wrote: post #8
Nickoladze wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if I'm being dumb here, I've never heard of Play before. It is a replacement for Tomcat?

Play is a web development framework. It has the capability to run standalone using it's built in http server or it can output a .WAR file that can be run under containers like Tomcat. http://www.playframework.com/documentation/1.2/deployment

and play 2.1+ can serve https as well http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.2.x/Configuring.... In practice, play instances are behind a front end server such as nginx for load balancing, https, caching, and virtual hosting. Play's convention for stateless sessions makes it really attractive to scale by adding more instances to the node balancer.

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#25

Post by nostromo »

stingraycharles wrote: post #17
saryant wrote: post #2

We're using Play pretty heavily at our startup though not for our customer-facing frontend, that's still in Rails. What we love about Play: * Async everything, especially the web service library * JSON macros * Scala-based templates * Integration with Akka * Support for server-sent events (we use this for cluster monitoring) What we wish was better: * JSON deserialization performance isn't as good as raw Jackson yet.…

What I never understood is why they embrace rendering templates at the server. Is it simply a matter of "because we can and it's nice for the people that want to use it", or is there a real real reason why pushing raw HTML via AJAX request is better? I always thought the status quo in the web development world was to use a framework like Backbone.JS to communicate with your backend and use a client-side template engi…

We push HTML through AJAX to keep all of our templating centralized and consistent.

For a while we used templates for the container page, and then backbone and js templating for certain elements on the page. It can become the 2013 equivalent of spaghetti code if you're not careful.

Now, with HTML via AJAX, you have a clear separation of concerns. For example: the designer doesn't need a dev to make an HTML change, and the dev knows that there will be one place that controls how pages are rendered.

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#26

Post by namelezz »

russ519 wrote: post #3

For those that have some experience using Play with both Java and Scala, which Play variant do you enjoy working with the most? It sounds like there are some API difference between the Java and Scala versions and I'm curious whether those differences are a factor in deciding whether to go Java or Scala with Play. I'm a long time Java developer, envious of Ruby, interested in Scala for its potential in being a hybrid…

Scala no doubt for its expressiveness power. Extractor, case class/object, pattern matching, first class function, curry function, partially applied functions, implicit, trait and more are so powerful. Use them with caution or you will hate Scala. Rofl!

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#27

Post by eropple »

yareally wrote: post #4
russ519 wrote: post #3

For those that have some experience using Play with both Java and Scala, which Play variant do you enjoy working with the most? It sounds like there are some API difference between the Java and Scala versions and I'm curious whether those differences are a factor in deciding whether to go Java or Scala with Play. I'm a long time Java developer, envious of Ruby, interested in Scala for its potential in being a hybrid…

With Play 2.0 in Java, there's more verbosity (though nothing like any J2EE framework) in using Java and lack of syntactical sugar features as well as functional programming features (which are widely used in parts like JSON for Play). Also, you don't get the benefits of such things as optional parameters in Java. Don't get me wrong, the Java version of it is going to be better than any other Java web framework you e…

> Don't get me wrong, the Java version of it is going to be better than any other Java web framework you ever encountered most likely (especially if everything else one tried was based in part on J2EE/JSP since Play has none of those and no XML bs config).

It doesn't sound like you're really familiar with other Java frameworks. While I'm not really a fan of it, Ninja (as just one example) has none of that, and also doesn't have the torture chamber that is Play's (non-standard, custom, even more undocumented) flavor of sbt--easily the worst not-Maven Maven tool I have had the displeasure of working with.

I want to like Play because I love a ton of what they do, but just having to deal with sbt and the non-standard, doesn't-play-nice build system that they enforce has driven me away from it.

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#28

Post by eropple »

saryant wrote: post #2

We're using Play pretty heavily at our startup though not for our customer-facing frontend, that's still in Rails. What we love about Play: * Async everything, especially the web service library * JSON macros * Scala-based templates * Integration with Akka * Support for server-sent events (we use this for cluster monitoring) What we wish was better: * JSON deserialization performance isn't as good as raw Jackson yet.…

Fully agreed on a most of this; when Play does something well, it does something really well. I personally just wish the build system wasn't such a mess and so antithetical to good development practices--it's extremely hard to have something like a shared domain library among multiple projects (with hot reloading, i.e. if you need to iterate on it while you develop) without making a fake Play project with a conf directory and all of that. It feels built for independent systems/applications rather than ones that play (ha) nicely with each other.

(Also, using the Flyway module has made life a lot easier. play-evolutions is a bit wonky.)

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#29

Post by lmm »

Nickoladze wrote: post #6
saryant wrote: post #2

We're using Play pretty heavily at our startup though not for our customer-facing frontend, that's still in Rails. What we love about Play: * Async everything, especially the web service library * JSON macros * Scala-based templates * Integration with Akka * Support for server-sent events (we use this for cluster monitoring) What we wish was better: * JSON deserialization performance isn't as good as raw Jackson yet.…

Sorry if I'm being dumb here, I've never heard of Play before. It is a replacement for Tomcat?

No, it's mostly replacement for the spring-web/struts/jersey/etc. layer (though it also has its own templating layer to replace JSP or whaever). You can run it under tomcat if you want to.

Re: What’s new in Play 2.2

#30

Post by saryant »

eropple wrote: post #28
saryant wrote: post #2

We're using Play pretty heavily at our startup though not for our customer-facing frontend, that's still in Rails. What we love about Play: * Async everything, especially the web service library * JSON macros * Scala-based templates * Integration with Akka * Support for server-sent events (we use this for cluster monitoring) What we wish was better: * JSON deserialization performance isn't as good as raw Jackson yet.…

Fully agreed on a most of this; when Play does something well, it does something really well. I personally just wish the build system wasn't such a mess and so antithetical to good development practices--it's extremely hard to have something like a shared domain library among multiple projects (with hot reloading, i.e. if you need to iterate on it while you develop) without making a fake Play project with a conf dire…

You don't need to make a fake Play project to create a shared module. Any SBT or Maven project will work just fine.

That's how we do it anyways.

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