Have been using Play for a couple of years now. In regard to missing components, the goal is not to provide the kitchen sink, but rather the tools to build you

Have been using Play for a couple of years now. In regard to missing components, the goal is not to provide the kitchen sink, but rather the tools to build your house. This is where RoR, Django, etc. differ from Play. Play just provides the basic MVC stack along with essentials like, modular routing (AKA sub projects), excellent form generation and validation, http request wrappers (AKA action composition) for say, authentication ;-), an OK template layer (could be better, generics not supported), etc. Agreed, Play will not give you the rapid fire dynamic language based framework development experience, not while getting your feet wet at any rate. On the flipside, you've got the JVM ecosystem at your finger tips, a static type system backing your every (errant) move, blazing fast performance in production, and general zero-stress on deploy, the shit just works.