[saryant]

> builds upon the Akka actor framework

This is really where Play shines. I wouldn't bother with Play for a basic CRUD app, it makes you do too much grunt work yourself (e.g., authentication). But when you have a backend built on Akka and want to build a reactive, event-driven front-end Play makes it trivial.

Akka is the key. Its actor model just makes reasoning about concurrency so easy because of how it deals with state. Add in remoting and clustering and you've got a highly scalable, event-driven clustered backend without too much extra work on your part. Play fits into that sort of ecosystem quite nicely.