About this Book
This book will get you started developing web applications with Play 2, using the Java programming language. But, perhaps more importantly, it’ll also teach you the concepts behind web development with Play.
There are many Java web frameworks, but most of them have a key flaw: they try to hide the web behind an abstraction layer, rather than embracing it. That is the most important difference between Play and most other Java web frameworks (Servlets, we’re looking at you!).
Developing a web application with Play requires a certain mindset. Throughout the book, we try to teach you how to achieve that. If you’re a Java EE veteran, we’ll do our best to lessen the culture shock. But if you’re new to web development with Java, or web development in general, we’ve got your back, too. We do our best to explain everything about web development that you need to know.
The only assumption we make is that you have some background in Java programming—you should be comfortable reading and writing Java code. We’ve used Java 7 syntax throughout this book, since that is the supported version of Java at the time of writing.