Jörgen Lundberg

Play 1.0 was released in 2009 and was from the beginning very different from other java web frameworks. It is not based on the Servlet specification and just like Ruby on Rails and Django you don't have to re-compile, re-deploy your application when you've made some changes. You just save and hit reload. As the Play creators say, Play is not a java framework, it's a web framework.

Play 2.0 will be released in early 2012 and there are quite a lot of things that are new compared to Play 1.x. Scala is no longer a module, it's a core language just like java. There is more focus on Typesafety. Templates are no longer based on Groovy, they are Scala-based. The routing system will also be type-checked. This will however not change the "save and reload" workflow we've gotten used to in Play 1.x.

This presentation will give you an introduction to the Play framework comparing the 2.0 and 1.x releases to highlight some of the main differences using brief set of slides and some live coding.