[mosburger]

I think the overarching fear of tight coupling is what drove enterprise Java to the brink of madness. I blame people who got screwed by frameworks like EJB (pre-3) and Struts (pre-2.0). After the frustration of being "stuck" with these architectural decisions, the community did a 180 and went to excessively loose coupling and fear of inheritance.

Now the complexity of frameworks like Spring and Hibernate drive people away from Java because setting up a simple website is such a chore. It seems like libraries like Play and Stripes aim for the middle ground that makes web platforms like Rails and Django so popular.

Admittedly, they serve different audiences. It seems like frameworks like Play are better aimed at simple public websites and not "enterprise web services" or whatnot. And that's fine.

</pointless-rambling>

[jiggy2011]

Play framework uses hibernate + JPA under the hood (although you may be able to switch it for something else) but provides so much candy around it that it feels like using Doctrine or something.

This isn't a bad thing as hibernate is an extremely powerful and complete ORM which I trust allot more than any of the half baked ones.

If you want to use hibernate properly I recommend reading "Java Persistence with Hibernate" It explains the framework very well including the logic behind allot of the things that feel strange or over engineered with it.