That's true about JSON - it can be quite tedious if you have to write JSON reads and writes for things like JSON validation. But Play can autogenerate the reads

That's true about JSON - it can be quite tedious if you have to write JSON reads and writes for things like JSON validation. But Play can autogenerate the reads/writes combinators for cases where validation isn't needed, so it ends up being as simple as putting a JsonFormatter in your companion object for a case class - 1 line. Play (and Jerkson) usually knows what to do with it, assuming all nested classes have json formatters in their companion objects, too. I am just glad to be done with PHP.