[angelzen]

Not familiar with Akka of Play2, but you articulated the point of overcomplicating the task of returning a simple response to a simple request via a litany of rarely useful concepts quite clearly.

OTOH, I wish popular web frameworks had a clearly documented 'no magic' option that doesn't critically depend on global methods and decorators. Again, not familiar with Play1 other than your example, but I recently did spent too much time wrangling a moderate backend build on with python/flask as a beginner going through the learning curve. After the first 5 minutes of 'look ma, I have a running server', the overreliance of globals became an unpleasant annoyance impeding test writing, with surprises abounding.

[helsinki]

Yeah, I agree, despite being an advanced Python programmer and a fan of the language. Writing a production grade web app requires some proprietary boilerplate black magic that is quite difficult to get right at first, but once you get it right, it’s something you carry along with you across projects.

Declaring, managing, and providing a proper test fixture for the ‘app context’ in a Flask app can be rather hideous. Having said that, despite the poor aesthetics and contours, that black magic is incredibly reliable once you get it right.