Chapter 4. Quick introduction to Play
This chapter covers
- The structure of a Play application
- The core concepts of Play, including HTTP actions and WebSocket handlers
- A few advanced features, such as customization mechanisms for error handling and custom request filters
The Play Framework is a web application framework inspired in its design by Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django. Unlike most JVM-based web application frameworks, Play doesn’t build on top of the Servlet standard, but instead has its own lightweight abstraction of the HTTP and WebSocket protocols. It’s stateless at its core (it doesn’t hold server-side state) and it’s built around the concept of asynchronous request handling. Along with providing a high-performance framework, Play is also guided by the idea of rapid development and prototyping, allowing you to see changes almost instantly after having made them in code.