What is Play?

Introduction

The Play application helps in setting up our preferred IDE. Working with Play is easy. We don't need a sophisticated IDE because Play automatically compiles and refreshes the modifications we make to our source files so that we can efficiently work using a simple text editor.

However, many exciting productivity features like auto-completion, on-the-fly compilation, assisted refactoring, and debugging are there for us if we use a modern Java or Scala IDE.       

In this article, we will learn the introduction to Play, what play is, play requirements, and examples to deeply understand Play.     

What is Play?

🔺Play is a high-productivity Java and Scala web application framework that combines components and APIs for modern online application development.

🔺 Web developers developed a play application to provide programming patterns that are both concise and functional.

🔺 A huge community is working day by day to increase the excellence of play application, and they are trying to make it easier to use as a beg

🔺 Play provides all components required to construct Web Applications and REST services, such as an integrated HTTP server, form handling, CSRF protection, a robust routing mechanism, I18n support, and more.

🔺 Play saves valuable development time by directly supporting ordinary tasks and allowing for hot reloading so you can see the results early.

🔺 Play's lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture needs Akka and Akka Streams under the covers to deliver predictable and minimum resource use (CPU, memory, threads) (CPU, memory, threads). Applications scale naturally both as horizontally and vertically.

🔺 Play is not-opinionated about the database access and integrates with many object-relational mapping (ORM) layers. It comes with Anorm, Slick, and JPA support, but many consumers choose NoSQL or alternative ORMs.

Play requirements

🔻A Play application needs to include the Play JAR files, which helps to work efficiently.

🔻The maven repository publishes the JAR files, and you can build a Play project with any Java or Scala build tool.

🔻When we use the sbt, Play provides an enhanced development experience (support for routes, template compilation, and auto-reloading).

Installation and verification of sbt and Java

🔻To run the play application, you need to download the Java and the sbt versions by clicking on the link.

After you download the latest Java version, you can check the version of Java by using the command:

Java –version

Play Example

Let's try to build a very simple web application. In the below example, we will briefly understand what Play is and help us understand the fundamentals of the play framework.

Let's open a command prompt and run the following command:

sbt new scala/hello-world.g8

It takes several minutes to execute and then it asks about the name of the project.

When we provide such names to the sbt then a main class is formed which is like this

We have changed the statement, and to run it in the command prompt, we need to type run to execute the main file.

After the execution of the main file, we will see something like this in the command prompt, which shows success to the code: