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> Scala Play webapp I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10

> Scala Play webapp I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10 or 12 years ago, Play had a lot of energy and momentum, and it's a kind of thing that has broad enterprise/start up appeal. But focus was always more on Akka and what seemed like really niche architecture astronaut stuff like Actors and Actor System Clusters and Event Sourcing etc, rather than getting the basics to be super ergonomic or productive. If they had keep just making Play Framework better and better and focusing on the practical problems that every web service faces, they could be in a similar great position as Laravel is in today or any of the many Rails/Laravel consultancies.

rco8786 2y ago
Totally agree. I wrote a few Play apps way back when and really enjoyed it. I was so excited about the future of the framework and how it would beat out Java for web apps, and steal folks away from the Rails ecosystem. And then it just…stopped. Not sure what happened there honestly.
lmm 2y ago
> I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10 or 12 years ago, Play had a lot of energy and momentum, and it's a kind of thing that has broad enterprise/start up appeal. But focus was always more on Akka and what seemed like really niche architecture astronaut stuff like Actors and Actor System Clusters and Event Sourcing etc, rather than getting the basics to be super ergonomic or productive. I'd say the opposite. They pushed Play a lot. But it was never a killer app, and it never even really leveraged the strengths of Scala. People and especially companies don't switch languages for "super ergonomic and productive". They switch because they want to do something they can't do in their current language. I'm not a fan of Akka or Actors, but it made for some incredible demos that you really couldn't do in anything else except Erlang.
- joshlemer 2y ago
  I disagree, productivity and ergonomics drives plenty of popular tools - React, Laravel, Rails, React Native, etc.
  - acjohnson55 2y ago
    Yeah, but I don't think Play (which I enjoyed) was ever going to top those, unless it had a fundamentally new idea to bring.
    - joshlemer 2y ago
      Laravel and Django didn't bring fundamentally new ideas above and beyond Rails.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Hmm. Fair point for Rails and Laravel (whereas I think React had a killer app in terms of being able to make SPAs without going crazy) but those are tools that you can pick up for a one-off throwaway project - indeed I suspect most adopters didn't "move" to them so much as start doing projects in them and eventually stop doing projects in other things. Scala was never really competing in that space - I don't think anyone would ever say "let's make our website for the next tradeshow in Play" - it's a "heavy" language that needs an IDE and deep familiarity to get the best out of it (and partly that's also what JVM folks would be expecting). So it needed to play for the big core codebases, and for a while it did (particularly when there was no alternative to Spark). Could they have made Play an alternative to Rails for one-off throwaway websites? Maybe, but the thing that would have needed to be different wouldn't be pushing Play itself, but rather lighter tooling and making it easier to get from zero to pages being served. Honestly I struggle to see how they could've done it without making the compiler and build tool much faster, and either making the IDEs much more efficient (difficult) or making the language easier without an IDE (difficult, and would risk splitting efforts). And even then, you wouldn't really show the compelling advantage of Scala, which is fearless refactoring in large codebases. I don't know that it could ever have been better than Rails at what Rails does, and also we already have Rails. Whereas even if it eventually "dies", Scala has already pushed Java and Kotlin to be much better than they were.
- hocuspocus 2y ago
  That is correct. Play's hype did more harm than good. I work at a company that has many legacy projects in Scala because we were/are heavily invested in Spark, and Play is a disaster overall.
  - joshlemer 2y ago
    What is so bad specifically about play?
    - KajMagnus 2y ago
      I use Play, and I think it is a good web framework, nowadays. In the past, however, upgrading to new versions, was annoying, because of pretty big changes in the API. (Don't know if this is what GP had in mind though.) And even worse (I suppose) for people who were using the different ORMs which have come and gone, instead of plain SQL. Akka has been annoying too: Adding WebSocket to my project, using Akka, was extremely much more complicated than doing the same in Nodejs (at least looking at the Nodejs docs I've seen). Today, to me, Play is feature complete and all I want is maintenance updates (and performance optimizations but not so important). And yes, that's how things look right now: Some bigger companies pay an open-source maintainer, so Play gets regular maintenance updates, but not any annoying major API changes (or so I hope), nice. Play has become boring in a good way? :- ) (Thinking about some "Use boring tech" HN posts.)
    - hocuspocus 2y ago
      Like KajMagnus mentioned: - The churn caused by breaking changes in minor versions used to be annoyingly high. - Slick looks neat at first but caused a lot of friction when used by less experienced developers. - The fact Akka is in your dependency tree encourages people to reach for it and raw actors are usually a bad choice. Akka streams work well for websockets and SSE but it's another footgun. Additionally: - It was in state of semi-abandonment for several years before Lightbend gave the project to the community. Even though there are/were big companies deploying Play apps at scale, for instance Apple. - The introduction of Guice (in 2.4 afaik) was a terrible mistake, completely unnecessary and at odds with the Scala philosophy. Sure you can not use it, or use something else (like macwire) but defaults matter. - Play-JSON depends on Jackson which is annoying in the JVM world, causing binary compatibility issues when you have diamond dependencies. - Standard library Futures are not so nice when you've experienced anything else (Scalaz Task, Cats IO, ZIO, even Twitter Future...) - Code generation from routes files is an odd choice when Scala has always been expressive and DSL friendly. - Swagger/OpenAPI integration is brittle. I've personally used Tapir since 2019 and couldn't be happier. All Play apps still running at my company are being abandoned or replaced by Spring/Java projects.

rco8786 2y ago

Totally agree. I wrote a few Play apps way back when and really enjoyed it. I was so excited about the future of the framework and how it would beat out Java for web apps, and steal folks away from the Rails ecosystem. And then it just…stopped. Not sure what happened there honestly.

lmm 2y ago

> I feel like the biggest misstep that the Scala ecosystem and Typesafe/Lightbend did was that they didn't invest more in Play Framework. 10 or 12 years ago, Play had a lot of energy and momentum, and it's a kind of thing that has broad enterprise/start up appeal. But focus was always more on Akka and what seemed like really niche architecture astronaut stuff like Actors and Actor System Clusters and Event Sourcing etc, rather than getting the basics to be super ergonomic or productive. I'd say the opposite. They pushed Play a lot. But it was never a killer app, and it never even really leveraged the strengths of Scala. People and especially companies don't switch languages for "super ergonomic and productive". They switch because they want to do something they can't do in their current language. I'm not a fan of Akka or Actors, but it made for some incredible demos that you really couldn't do in anything else except Erlang.

joshlemer 2y ago
I disagree, productivity and ergonomics drives plenty of popular tools - React, Laravel, Rails, React Native, etc.
- acjohnson55 2y ago
  Yeah, but I don't think Play (which I enjoyed) was ever going to top those, unless it had a fundamentally new idea to bring.
  - joshlemer 2y ago
    Laravel and Django didn't bring fundamentally new ideas above and beyond Rails.
- lmm 2y ago
  Hmm. Fair point for Rails and Laravel (whereas I think React had a killer app in terms of being able to make SPAs without going crazy) but those are tools that you can pick up for a one-off throwaway project - indeed I suspect most adopters didn't "move" to them so much as start doing projects in them and eventually stop doing projects in other things. Scala was never really competing in that space - I don't think anyone would ever say "let's make our website for the next tradeshow in Play" - it's a "heavy" language that needs an IDE and deep familiarity to get the best out of it (and partly that's also what JVM folks would be expecting). So it needed to play for the big core codebases, and for a while it did (particularly when there was no alternative to Spark). Could they have made Play an alternative to Rails for one-off throwaway websites? Maybe, but the thing that would have needed to be different wouldn't be pushing Play itself, but rather lighter tooling and making it easier to get from zero to pages being served. Honestly I struggle to see how they could've done it without making the compiler and build tool much faster, and either making the IDEs much more efficient (difficult) or making the language easier without an IDE (difficult, and would risk splitting efforts). And even then, you wouldn't really show the compelling advantage of Scala, which is fearless refactoring in large codebases. I don't know that it could ever have been better than Rails at what Rails does, and also we already have Rails. Whereas even if it eventually "dies", Scala has already pushed Java and Kotlin to be much better than they were.
hocuspocus 2y ago
That is correct. Play's hype did more harm than good. I work at a company that has many legacy projects in Scala because we were/are heavily invested in Spark, and Play is a disaster overall.
- joshlemer 2y ago
  What is so bad specifically about play?
  - KajMagnus 2y ago
    I use Play, and I think it is a good web framework, nowadays. In the past, however, upgrading to new versions, was annoying, because of pretty big changes in the API. (Don't know if this is what GP had in mind though.) And even worse (I suppose) for people who were using the different ORMs which have come and gone, instead of plain SQL. Akka has been annoying too: Adding WebSocket to my project, using Akka, was extremely much more complicated than doing the same in Nodejs (at least looking at the Nodejs docs I've seen). Today, to me, Play is feature complete and all I want is maintenance updates (and performance optimizations but not so important). And yes, that's how things look right now: Some bigger companies pay an open-source maintainer, so Play gets regular maintenance updates, but not any annoying major API changes (or so I hope), nice. Play has become boring in a good way? :- ) (Thinking about some "Use boring tech" HN posts.)
  - hocuspocus 2y ago
    Like KajMagnus mentioned: - The churn caused by breaking changes in minor versions used to be annoyingly high. - Slick looks neat at first but caused a lot of friction when used by less experienced developers. - The fact Akka is in your dependency tree encourages people to reach for it and raw actors are usually a bad choice. Akka streams work well for websockets and SSE but it's another footgun. Additionally: - It was in state of semi-abandonment for several years before Lightbend gave the project to the community. Even though there are/were big companies deploying Play apps at scale, for instance Apple. - The introduction of Guice (in 2.4 afaik) was a terrible mistake, completely unnecessary and at odds with the Scala philosophy. Sure you can not use it, or use something else (like macwire) but defaults matter. - Play-JSON depends on Jackson which is annoying in the JVM world, causing binary compatibility issues when you have diamond dependencies. - Standard library Futures are not so nice when you've experienced anything else (Scalaz Task, Cats IO, ZIO, even Twitter Future...) - Code generation from routes files is an odd choice when Scala has always been expressive and DSL friendly. - Swagger/OpenAPI integration is brittle. I've personally used Tapir since 2019 and couldn't be happier. All Play apps still running at my company are being abandoned or replaced by Spring/Java projects.