Preface

Back in 2009, I discovered Play by chance while surfing the web. I was surprised at how easy it was to get started with the framework. At the time, I was doing most of my web development using the Seam web framework. Play was a game changer then, and I started to build all my applications using it. Soon enough, I joined Guillaume Bort, the founder of Play, and contributed to the framework.

The framework started to gain more and more traction, though mostly in Europe. Time passed, and we released Play 1.1 and then Play 1.2. Then Guillaume started to envision a complete rewrite of Play using Scala as a core language, giving Play extra power. The goal was to empower Play’s users while keeping the main success ingredients: Play’s simplicity and rapidity. Guillaume soon joined forces with Sadek Drobi. Sadek put his functional programming knowledge into the mix and Play 2 was born! Though the Play 2 core uses advanced Scala features, Play 2 focuses on simplicity and has a fully supported Java API. Play 2 Java is probably the best option for building scalable web applications with simplicity in mind without sacrificing scalability and other features.