Play Framework 2.0 Final released (opens in new tab)

You might want to check out lift-json again. It can easily serialize and deserialize case classes. https://github.com/lift/lift/tree/master/framework/lift-base...

Also, Play 2.0 includes Jerkson, so whatever Jerkson can do, Play 2.0 can do. They just happened to add some helper utilities that made it very similar to lift-json. So I think the community is settling on something good and simple.

I disagree on the fact that JSON is a second-class citizen. A lot of effort went into good support of JSON. But obviously, Scala and Java being statically typed languages, you can't expect to use JSON in those languages like you use them in Javascript.

The reason why everyone encourage you to do so is because typeclass serialization is much more robust that introspection. With introspection you may have runtime exceptions, but with typeclass serialization you know at compile time when something is wrong.

Also, Jerkson is included in Play 2 (that's what we use as base for the Json lib) so you can use it directly if you want introspection.

But if you choose typeclass serialization, you can still define serializers easily, in one line, without losing the type-safety: https://github.com/playframework/Play20/blob/master/framewor...

Jerkson works really well. Can convert JSON into case-classes really nicely and handles snake-types.

Probably Xitrum? https://github.com/ngocdaothanh/xitrum

in play 2.0 (using computer-database java sample app):

  $ play
  [computer-database] $ test-only ModelTest

  or from the command line:
  $ play "test-only ModelTest"

Some interesting criticism of Play here - seems similar to what's been said about the lack of unit tests.

http://whilefalse.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-im-moving-away-fr...

This is the first controller I opened from their samples[1] :

  public class Forums extends Application {
    public static void index() {
      List forums = Forum.findAll();
      long topicsCount = Topic.count();
      long postsCount = Post.count();
      render(forums, topicsCount, postsCount);
    }
  ...
  }

You can't mock out Forum, Topic or Post. You can't inject some type of "FormRepository" or whatever pattern you want to gain some type of control. In Ruby, or most dynamic languages, this wouldn't be a problem, since a class method can (and should) be mocked. Even if a static language allows for that sort of trickery (for example, there are a couple ways to test the above in C#), it's the wrong approach. Dependencies should be injected and thus controlled. I guess you could inject using static setters, but that's just a bad workaround to what, in my opinion, is a fundamental misunderstanding of how to write testable code.

[1] https://github.com/playframework/play/blob/master/samples-an...

"resort to another framework to reach a goal that I expect to be easy"

is a perfectly good reason to state something is a "serious annoyance".

I totally agree that the best case scenario is Play 2 lowering the learning curve and providing a bridge for java devs trying to get up to speed with Scala.

I just think it will be hard to justify play2's use in java-heavy organizations if Java support is a second citizen to Scala.

I loved Play 1.2.x, I think it is the only framework that really provides a way forward for modern java web dev, and I strongly hope Play 2 keeps things moving.

> It's going to take a little while for a language like Scala (or any JVM based language) to fully penetrate the market.

By a wide margin, the overall consensus in the JVM community seems to be that Scala will probably never be more popular than it is today, which means, it will never become mainstream. Hopefully, one of Ceylon or Kotlin will succeed where Scala failed.

With that in mind, Play betting on Scala is quite a risky direction indeed.

You can get it directly from scala-lang.org:

http://www.scala-lang.org/downloads

The new typesafe-stack deb package also wants to install all of OpenJDK as well, even if you've got Oracle JDK already installed and on the path.

Which indeed is talking about stream processing. Play's stream processing uses iteratee IO to correct control inversions often suffered by networking libraries.

However, Play does not offer automatic facilities for having variables (and interface) update when other variables change, as described in the Wikipedia article. For examples of reactive programming, see Knockout, batman.js and Ember.js (all primarily client-side).