Play 2.0 is out. But it's got a curfew.

According to the movie trailers, "Play 2.0 is still under heavy development and APIs are likely to change, but you can already have a look and download the preview version."

Of course, this does beg the question: "do we really need another Java web development framework?" If anything, more and more enterprise development shops are moving away from the world of bloated frameworks, and going back to basics, with simple Servlet and JSP applications that leverage the latest JavaScript libraries like JQuery and DOJO to do the cool stuff up front, and connect to simple, RESTful web services on the back end to do the hard stuff. There's something to be said for keeping it simple.

But having said that, Play keeps gaining traction in the industry. Over the past couple of years, we're seeing more and more people talking about Play and Vaadin in our surveys. Clearly the community hasn't hit the saturation point.

So, if you're up for learning another framework, check out Play. Lots of smart and handsome people seem to be adopting it.

http://www.playframework.org/2.0#faq

I'm normally a wicket guy.  In fact, I still consider myself a wicket guy.  But I *have* used play and it is awesome.  It's for building a different kind of app in many ways than wicket so I don't feel (too) guilty about saying that.  :)

Now as for your statement that "more and more enterprise development shops are moving away from the world of bloated frameworks, and going back to basics, with simple Servlet and JSP applications," those shops are Stone Stupid(tm) and I would not care to work there.  ;)

Play is great?  Do we need another java framework?  Did we need the last 80?  I'd suggest these guys wouldn't have written this if they hadn't felt something was missing.  Do we need it?  Doubtful.  Am I glad they did it?  Without a doubt.

Despite it's name, Play isn't really a web framework.  It's more of a web application platform for Java and Scala.

I've been playing with Play for a few months now.  I was reluctant about it at first.  But I've been wrong just about every time I said "I doubt they did x" or "They probably didn't implement y right."  It is really a breath of fresh air for web development in Java and Scala.

They have also done a great job making Play cloud-ready.  It uses a stateless architecture that scales great on cloud application platforms like Heroku.  Play also has out-of-the-box support for using Memcached as a replacement for session state.

For the reluctant out there, I'd encourage you to give it a try.  I did.  And I've been very surprised and happy with Play!

-James (Heroku)

I Just have to say playframeworks ROCKS!

If anything, more and more enterprise development shops are moving away from the world of bloated frameworks, and going back to basics

I recognize this. All the add on frameworks are largely unnecessary when you can use plain and basic Java EE 6, which is really a full stack solution and has simple too use but powerful and effective things like JSF, CDI and EJB3.

I just spent about an hour reading the Play website and I realized that I need to spend more hours on it to understand why it doesn't use/follow the maven structures (how Play provides basic features that maven does, like library dependency management), how it supports the db transaction management, how it supports aop (I think i need aop for caching only, but a generic aop support as in Spring is great), how it supports jms ...

CDI and EJB3 are great, but I'm not sure about JSF. Before, I thought JSF was greate (maybe it was because my Javascript skill at that time was not as good as today). Today I think JSF is complicated. I prefer plain html, jsp and javascript. I like the simplicity of the @RequestMapping, @RequestParam, @PathVariable of Spring (wonder if there'll be anything similar in the next Servlet version). The Spring's ContentNegotiatingViewResolver is also good, but I feel that it can be done better (although I don't know how :) ).

CDI and EJB3 are great, but I'm not sure about JSF. Before, I thought JSF was greate (maybe it was because my Javascript skill at that time was not as good as today). Today I think JSF is complicated.

I was skeptical about JSF before. Tried JSF 1.0 and hated it. JSF 1.2 was so-so (especially when you used JSP, with Facelets it was massively better already), but now I'm completely in love with JSF 2.1.

It is not complicated, but really quite simple. Sometimes I do see people doing things in way too complicated ways with JSF (probably they learned this from ancient tutorials), but idiomatic modern JSF is really all about simplicity.

REST makes sense for web applications. JavaScript makes sense for web applications. REST on the server and JavaScript for interactive clients make sense for targeting both web browsers and mobile devices. There is still a need for pluggable server-side development frameworks even when implementing with primarily REST and JavaScript.

Mainly the server side frameworks are used for things like: backend data storage and retreival, authenticatio, user management, heavy lifting (working with PDFs, images, faxes, email, or other resources that the REST API exposes).

Grails, Play, Lift, and Wicket, etc. all have thier place and all I'm sure have room for improvement. The aim of these frameworks is to make development easier.. which is an on going effort for perfection, an unacheivable goal but worth working towards.

Grails, Play, Lift, and Wicket, etc. all have thier place and all I'm sure have room for improvement. The aim of these frameworks is to make development easier.. which is an on going effort for perfection, an unacheivable goal but worth working towards.

A pretty balaced point of view!

Would be happy to hear yor advice on HybridJava possible improvements too.

for spanish speaking developers out there here's the play! 2.0 translated announcement

and here is the whole play framework documentation site in spanish: http://playdoces.appspot.com

saludos

sas