It’s a shame that the Play framework is being abandoned. v1 had a lot of great ideas, but v2 kind of jumped off the cliff into Scala lala-land, where it got lost in the weeds. It never really recovered.<p>If you’re looking for a straightforward Java framework similar to Play v1 check out Ninja:<p><a href="https://www.ninjaframework.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ninjaframework.org/</a><p>For me at least, it hits a sweet spot of enabling fast productive development and maintainable code.
The recent focus on Akka is in line with Lightbend securing a 25MM funding round last year, and the ensuing layoffs of Scala engineers <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842166" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842166</a>
Has anyone had great success with akka? It seems like it could definitely solve some problems elegantly. My team has had trouble with maintainability due to complexity (not clear if that's inherent in akka or just with how we implemented it). It can be somewhat managed by senior engineers but has seemed to be difficult for junior engineers to effectively maintain akka code.
Biggest problem I had with Akka was that it was that it worked better with Scala than Java. As Java recently has re-taken most of Scala's momentum its a bit awkward fit.