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>but then Play as a framework looked very heavy for my usage. The terms "lightweight" and "heavyweight" and variants get thrown around alot describing framewor

>but then Play as a framework looked very heavy for my usage. The terms "lightweight" and "heavyweight" and variants get thrown around alot describing frameworks, but can mean different things to different people: - size of framework codebase - size of app codebase - amount of code it takes to accomplish common tasks - memory footprint - deployment system - learning curve - feature list (barebones vs kitchen sink) etc etc. If you could elaborate a little on what heavy and lightweight you're referring to, the Lift/Play/Scalatra/etc experts might be able to better address that.

girvo 13y ago
In my testing, I evaluated Play 2 (right on release), and Grails 2 (Groovy is nice). My thing is, Play seemed to do literally everything. I think it would be brilliant if I knew Scala well, but my problem is I dont even know Java! Ill use that as a segue: I had the same issue with Groovy/Grails -- great framework, nice language, but my lack of Java experience hasn't.made things as productive as I expected based on the hype I've seen. Play simply seemed like I was learning Play, not Scala. I felt the same way when using Rails, which I never took too. The only larger more fully featured framework I've used and enjoyed is Symfony2, and that is solely due to my expertise in PHP. I hope that helps explain what I meant. What should I do?
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  Was in same boat as you 3 years ago, new to the JVM. Started with a few pleasant months of pure Groovy, followed by 6 painful months with Grails (during the pre 2.x days). At that point I had my feet wet and realized that Groovy, as language, was not going to cut it (tried building a CRUD layer on top of Grails and Groovy's lack of static typing became a real thorn). At the time James Strachan had ditched Groovy (the very language he had created, mind you) and was raving about the wonders of Scala. Interested I picked up the stairway book, Programming in Scala. That changed my life as a programmer. Checked out Scalatra, Spray, Lift, and Play. Play wound up being the best fit. I still get JIRA notifications for bug requests I created with Grails -- each one the devs just kick the can down the road (fix) to the next version, glad I left ;-)
  - virtualwhys 13y ago
    lol, now this is ironic, not having received a Grails JIRA notice in quite some time, after posting the above I checked my email and voila: "Shared constraints not working in URL mappings Fix Version/s: 2.3-RC1 (struck through) Fix Version/s: 2.3-RC2 (the kicked can)" ;-)
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  As hackerboos suggested, try Scalatra [1], the Sinatra of Scala frameworks (eg, simple, lightweight). As for not knowing Java, there's not a whole lot of carryover from Java at the language level. There is at the JVM level obviously, but you can ignore JVM tuning and bytecode and whatnot till later. In fact, I actually found learning Haskell to be more valuable than Java in understanding Scala. Learn You A Haskell [2] is one of the best general programming books I've read, Lipovaca is excellent at explaining complicated functional programming concepts. [1]: http://scalatra.org/ http://scalatra.org/ [2]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/

girvo 13y ago

In my testing, I evaluated Play 2 (right on release), and Grails 2 (Groovy is nice). My thing is, Play seemed to do literally everything. I think it would be brilliant if I knew Scala well, but my problem is I dont even know Java! Ill use that as a segue: I had the same issue with Groovy/Grails -- great framework, nice language, but my lack of Java experience hasn't.made things as productive as I expected based on the hype I've seen. Play simply seemed like I was learning Play, not Scala. I felt the same way when using Rails, which I never took too. The only larger more fully featured framework I've used and enjoyed is Symfony2, and that is solely due to my expertise in PHP. I hope that helps explain what I meant. What should I do?

virtualwhys 13y ago
Was in same boat as you 3 years ago, new to the JVM. Started with a few pleasant months of pure Groovy, followed by 6 painful months with Grails (during the pre 2.x days). At that point I had my feet wet and realized that Groovy, as language, was not going to cut it (tried building a CRUD layer on top of Grails and Groovy's lack of static typing became a real thorn). At the time James Strachan had ditched Groovy (the very language he had created, mind you) and was raving about the wonders of Scala. Interested I picked up the stairway book, Programming in Scala. That changed my life as a programmer. Checked out Scalatra, Spray, Lift, and Play. Play wound up being the best fit. I still get JIRA notifications for bug requests I created with Grails -- each one the devs just kick the can down the road (fix) to the next version, glad I left ;-)
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  lol, now this is ironic, not having received a Grails JIRA notice in quite some time, after posting the above I checked my email and voila: "Shared constraints not working in URL mappings Fix Version/s: 2.3-RC1 (struck through) Fix Version/s: 2.3-RC2 (the kicked can)" ;-)
SkyMarshal 13y ago
As hackerboos suggested, try Scalatra [1], the Sinatra of Scala frameworks (eg, simple, lightweight). As for not knowing Java, there's not a whole lot of carryover from Java at the language level. There is at the JVM level obviously, but you can ignore JVM tuning and bytecode and whatnot till later. In fact, I actually found learning Haskell to be more valuable than Java in understanding Scala. Learn You A Haskell [2] is one of the best general programming books I've read, Lipovaca is excellent at explaining complicated functional programming concepts. [1]: http://scalatra.org/ http://scalatra.org/ [2]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/