The Play team is proud to announce the release of Play 2.3.0! This is a huge release, incorporating a lot of hard work from different teams and over 150 individuals on GitHub.
For the first time, Play 2.3 highlights have been published as an interactive tutorial in Activator. You can still read over the highlights here, but for the best experience, visit the Play 2.3 Highlights Activator Template page, download the template bundle, follow the instructions to run it, and then browse the tutorial, getting to see first hand the new features offered by Play 2.3.
One common complaint that we heard about Play was that the client side tooling - LESS, Coffeescript, RequireJS etc - was too slow and too limited. Play 2.3 fixes this with the introduction of sbt-web, a new asset pipeline for sbt. sbt-web allows you to select JavaScript engines for running client side asset processors, either Rhino, for standalone in JVM processing, or Node, for a fast native processing.
sbt-web also offers pipelines and extension points, using standard sbt mechanisms, to configure and plug in custom assets processors to your hearts content. Using these mechanisms, sbt-web features new functionality not previously available in Play, including zero config JavaScript testing using mocha, and out of the box production asset fingerprinting.
First class support for Java 8 has been a big focus of Play 2.3, with documentation code samples now offered both with Java 6 and Java 8 variants. Check out Play’s documentation on asynchronous programming for an example. Additionally, several parts of the Play Java API have been revamped to make them more natural to use with lambdas.
This is just a start to the many improvements and bug fixes available in Play 2.3. Read the the rest of the Play 2.3 Highlights, and download Play today to get started with the Reactive Web Framework for Java and Scala.
