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We're building an app that will be going into production in the next few weeks. It's not a huge application, probably around 300 hours of work. Coming from a f

We're building an app that will be going into production in the next few weeks. It's not a huge application, probably around 300 hours of work. Coming from a framework stack of WebWork/Struts2, Spring and Hibernate, it's a total breath of fresh air. Everything is there that you ask for, even nice little helper methods like encrypting strings, resizing images or serving byte arrays as documents. We keep expecting to find some big shortcoming that brings about loads of painful refactoring, but it hasn't happened yet! The templating engine is simple, clean and gets out of your way. The hot reloading really does work. The fact that there is NO XML configuration in our app is blissful and a real wake up call to how absurd Spring and Hibernate configuration used to be. The error messages are almost always enough to show you straight away where the problem is. The only downside is that it completely shuns the entire Servlet API (although I appreciate that this is where a lot of the simplicity comes from). As a result you cant leverage any servlet-based components. But maybe that's a good thing. I'm seriously impressed. I thought my company was going to have to make a jump to python or ruby to get such a clean, simple well thought through full-stack framework, but we dont.

rufugee 17y ago
I'm curious...can you describe a servlet-based component that you might want to reuse? As I've been doing Ruby mostly for the last few years, I'm struggling to think of an example.
- bigclumsyoaf 17y ago
  I'm not sure what dabeeeenster had in mind, but I know that we previously integrated third party forums and other modules into our servlet based applications. You still have the option to run servlet based components on a subdomain to keep your core Play app clean. I think because Play is Java, you tend to want to merge it into existing servlet applications, but you have to realise that it's the same as moving to an entirely new language. It might be based on the same core language, but its not really compatible. Although we were excited about creating something with Play, we had to hold back several months because there was no way to gradually migrate and integrate Play into our existing servlets. It only really works when you are starting a new project. Its not ideal, but as previously said, you have to treat it as completely separate, not linked to servlets and its as though you are moving to Ruby etc.

rufugee 17y ago

I'm curious...can you describe a servlet-based component that you might want to reuse? As I've been doing Ruby mostly for the last few years, I'm struggling to think of an example.

bigclumsyoaf 17y ago
I'm not sure what dabeeeenster had in mind, but I know that we previously integrated third party forums and other modules into our servlet based applications. You still have the option to run servlet based components on a subdomain to keep your core Play app clean. I think because Play is Java, you tend to want to merge it into existing servlet applications, but you have to realise that it's the same as moving to an entirely new language. It might be based on the same core language, but its not really compatible. Although we were excited about creating something with Play, we had to hold back several months because there was no way to gradually migrate and integrate Play into our existing servlets. It only really works when you are starting a new project. Its not ideal, but as previously said, you have to treat it as completely separate, not linked to servlets and its as though you are moving to Ruby etc.