Chapter 10. Web services, iteratees, and WebSockets

 

This chapter covers

  • Accessing web services
  • Using the iteratee library to deal with large responses
  • Using WebSockets
  • Creating custom body parsers

In previous chapters, we saw the elementary parts of a Play application. Your toolkit now contains all the tools you need to start building your own real-world applications. But there’s more to Play. Many web applications perform similar functionality, and Play bundles some libraries that make those functionalities easier to build, such as a cache, a library for making web service requests, libraries for OpenID and OAuth authentication, and utilities for cryptography and filesystem access.

Play also lays the foundation for the next generation of web applications, with live streams of data flowing between server and client and between multiple servers. Pages with live updates, chat applications, and large file uploads are becoming more and more common, and Play’s iteratee and WebSocket libraries give you the concepts and tools to handle such streams of data.

10.1. Accessing web services

10.2. Dealing with streams using the iteratee library

10.3. WebSockets: Bidirectional communication with the browser

10.4. Using body parsers to deal with HTTP request bodies

10.5. Another way to look at iteratees

10.6. Summary