Chapter 2. The parts of an application

Now that you know what Play is all about, it’s time to start building a serious application. In this chapter, we’ll dive deeper into what makes up a Play application, and give you an introduction to all the important concepts you’ll need to know about when building a Play application. The following chapters will then explore each concept in more detail.

In this chapter, we’ll also introduce the example application that we’ll evolve into an enterprise-like application as we progress through the chapters of this book. The application we chose will be an example of a real-world application; not the next Twitter or Facebook, which have specific and uncommon requirements and challenges,^[1] but something your customer might ask you to build. We start by creating a new application and identifying all the files that make up the new application. After that, we’ll set up an IDE so that we’re ready to start the coding in the next chapter.

¹ Although you could certainly use Play for them!

Let’s see what we’re going to build.

2.1. Introducing our application

2.2. A rundown of a Play application

2.3. Play’s configuration files

2.4. Build configuration files

2.5. Public assets

2.6. Application code

2.7. Setting up an IDE

2.8. Summary