About this Book
You’re probably reading this book because you want to build a web app. This book is about one way of doing that.
There are so many different web applications that the question, “How should I do X?” can often only be answered with, “It depends.” So instead of trying to give some general advice that won’t be good for many cases anyway, we’ll introduce Play’s components, their relations, and their strengths and weaknesses. Armed with this knowledge, and the knowledge of your project that only you have, you can decide when to use a tool from Play or when to use something else.
In this book we use a fictitious company managing paperclip logistics as a vehicle for example code. This isn’t one running example that gets bigger with each chapter, culminating in a complete application at the end of the book. Rather, we wanted to save you from the cognitive load of having to “get into” the business domain of many different examples, so we chose this as a common business domain. The examples and the chapters themselves are mostly standalone, to aid readers who don’t read the book in one go or who want to skip chapters. We understand that some readers would value building one application that uses concepts from multiple chapters while reading the book, and we encourage those readers to pick a more interesting problem than that of paperclip logistics, and to try to adapt what they learn from this book to solving that problem instead.