What does Play 2 enable that was not possible or straightforward in Play 1?
(For Java, that is)
(For Java, that is)
- non-blocking IO with the powerful iteratee concepts (a nice approach to play with streams (EventSource/WebSockets/*) which is not only an event-based approach like in NodeJS, but more a "reactive" approach)
- functional approach of things with Scala
- everything is much more type-safe (especially templates) which make apps stronger (not prone to simple error like NPE in templates) but also faster (templates are compiled)
It does seem that real time data management is a good use case for Play2 but curious to know for typical web apps what benefits there would be.
This benchmark is based on Play 1 but you can see Japid is 4 - 5 times faster than the Scala template
Is there anything Play 2 Java can do that Play 1 Java + Japid template cannot do as well?
Seems like the move to Play 2 and Scala is more political than technical. The Play people formed an alliance with Typesafe, a Scala company, and thus decided to move away from Java and focus on Scala, abandoning their huge Java user base of Play 1.
This is a technical decision to build a web framework to the JVM. And even if the core is written in Scala, it doesn't mean you can't use it in Java. Give a try!