Play framework – Introduction

Posted on August 9, 2015 by Siva Prasad Rao Janapati — 1 Comment

In my previous articles, we have seen how to build REST services using Spring and Jersy. Both frameworks are good to implement REST services. But, I was looking for a lightweight web framework to build REST services by considering some characteristics.

Play satisfies the required characteristics as shown below,

REST Support
- The play has first in class support for REST.
More Developer Productive
- Play provides high developer productivity but having hot reload of code, templates, config changes, etc. The developer just needs to do the code change and refresh the page to see the update. No rebuild and redeployment.
Reactive
- Play is backed up by Akka and Netty server to be reactive and supports non-blocking I/O.
Open source
- Play is open source and is released under the Apache 2 License.
Less System Resource Utilization
- Play consumes fewer system resources like CPU and memory as it uses only one thread to process the requests(against the traditional servers where one thread per request).
Less Learning Curve
- Play is very simple to set up and work with less learning curve.
Pluggable Architecture
- The play has numerous modules which you can plugin based on the requirement.

In the coming articles, we will see how to install Play. Until then, “Stay Hungry” to learn.

About Siva Prasad Rao Janapati

Siva Janapati is an Architect with experience in building Cloud Native Microservices architectures, Reactive Systems, Large scale distributed systems, and Serverless Systems. Siva has hands-on in architecture, design, and implementation of scalable systems using Cloud, Java, Go lang, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Spring, Spring Boot, Lightbend reactive tech stack, APIGEE edge & on-premise and other open-source, proprietary technologies. Expertise working with and building RESTful, GraphQL APIs. He has successfully delivered multiple applications in retail, telco, and financial services domains. He manages the GitHub(https://github.com/2013techsmarts) where he put the source code of his work related to his blog posts.