To be fair, Play 2 is also vastly more powerful than Play 1 - the core concepts powering it are complex, but they lend flexibility that allow features like this to be added on top.
And Play2 core is composed of very robust components without any runtime enhancement, any magic. Using Scala power, we can build very clean tools, such as this one, without perverting typesafe/fully-compiled basements.
There was a long email thread on the play framework, but as someone who is doing Play 2/Scala, they're nothing even close to the same framework, enough that calling it the same name is silly. Further, the deprecation of Play 1 does no favors, and I'm just hoping that as things go forward, a fork will emerge.
I'm also hoping that Play 2 will stop taking so ing long to compile longer projects. Is 2.1 going to make me not want to claw my eyes out?
It depends on your mindset. I use both and love both but when it comes to massive changes on critical components in huge codebases give me static typing every time.
typesafety+compiled brings a robustness and sureness (and sometimes performance) that dynamic languages can't really provide. Dynamic languages are interesting in some domains also... I must admit I'm a big fan of static typed language since the beginning so I'm not really objective ;)
- 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)
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.
Nope this is not what happened.
Play team made the decision months before to start moving to Scala when experimenting the play-scala module of Play1.
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!
The first two are obviously Scala only which is of no help to those with existing Java code bases. And for templates Japid is much, much faster than the Scala equivalent.
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.
play1.x with scala was quite experimental (play2 is really different and robustly designed) and those benchmarks always generate trolls... Anyway, I can't make people change their mind about those points even if I had numbers to show because everyone sees what he wants to see. This is just subjectivity ;)