We use Play at work. It's the only reason I use an Algol dialect after 10 years of writing Lisps. It and Android, to be frank.<p>I believe we have one of the largest Play code bases. And I still enjoy it.<p>I picked it out of a line up, I tested Django, Rails, Cake, Java EE and buncha other stuff. I had just a month to pick a platform and budget limits for 4 staff and 2 years. So far I only needed just a gfx designer and I still do all coding myself.<p>Ask me anything about Play.
Play's simplicity and its favouring of 'getting-shit-done'-attitude over the 'layering-and-overarchitecting'-attitude in the Java community has greatly benefited its rise. I really hope this type-safe Scala reimplementation of the framework pays off and is not a step backwards.
We use Play heavily at work (eg. 50k SLOC). I love it.<p>However, I'm pretty nervous about 2.0, due to the tight coupling with Scala. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from trying to use Lift, and I did not care for sbt at all.<p>While typesafe templates seem like a good thing, I can't recall ever having bugs that would have been caught by them, and it looks like it will eliminate the magical boilerplate-free parameter passing from the current version of Play.
Wow these are really great news. Already used Play 1.2.3 and this was already amazing easy to work with.
Working now with grails 1.3.7 and I definitely will change to Play after finishing my current project.
Grails is a pain and it doesnt feel very light as its built uppon the spring stack which is huge. Using plugins is sometimes risky as they are outdated and you dont really understand what they are doing in the background.
I also like the type safe approach of Scala/Java which you dont have in grails(groovy/java). This is also very useful for code completion in IDEs
Play framework is a breath of fresh air compared to other Java frameworks. The only disadvantage I can see is that allot of the features to make things simpler do seem to more tightly couple you to it.
I just spent 20 minutes reading through the documentation and the changes look very good! I sometimes use Play for my own projects and I was very disappointed to not have been able to talk my largest customer into using Play when we kicked off two new projects 5 months ago. Oh well.<p>Play makes Java (or Scala) web development a light and fun experience.
I dinked around with Play a while ago and was impressed all around. However, am I the only one who thinks it would benefit immensely from a better name?
"Play" just makes it sound so... unrobust. It needs a name that conveys that it's industrial-strength. How about Chupacabra or Lugwrench or Nailgun or ...