Preface
We were early adopters of Play and saw it gain popularity among a wide variety of Play developers. Now it’s time for Play to go mainstream.
When I first tried the Play 1.0 release in 2010, I was struck by how simple it was. Having tried many different web frameworks, it was a refreshing change to find one that used what I already knew about HTTP and HTML (the web) instead of being based on non-web technology. In fact, the developer experience was so good, it felt like cheating.
I was also impressed by how finished Play seemed: this was no early experimental release. Many open-source projects adopt the “release early, release often” philosophy, which means a first public release is a version 0.1 that’s more of a prototype, vision statement, and call for participation. Play, on the other hand, started at version 1.0 and had clearly already been used to build real applications. Zenexity used Play on customer projects for some time before releasing version 1.0, and it wasn’t just Java developers using Play; web developers had been using it too. You could tell.