This is one of the things that Play does well; setters and getters are generated for you at runtime so you only have to write it as: public Date submittedAt;

This is one of the things that Play does well; setters and getters are generated for you at runtime so you only have to write it as: public Date submittedAt; and set/get it as you would any other variable. Easily one of my favorite things about the framework, and saves my { and } keys work as well.