Play Framework has grown in leaps and bounds in 2013! Not only has Play seen wide adoption in internet and social companies like LinkedIn, Klout, Gilt Groupe and Gawker Media, but recently more and more traditional enterprise shops are turning to the framework for its focus on developer productivity, reactive and modern web apps, and its usability with Scala and Java.
It is great to see the Play community growing quickly! To give you a quick snapshot: the Play mailing list has exceeded 10,000 members; we’ve grown to over 250 project contributors and the playframework project on GitHub now has almost four thousand “Stars,” making it one of the most popular server-side web frameworks; there are also over 5,731 questions tagged ‘playframework’ on StackOverflow; the @playframework Twitter account has over 12k followers, and there’s already huge momentum around a conference about Play called Ping in January 2014.
The Play team was also honored when ThoughtWorks noticed the recent pick-up of Play and has placed it in the “Trial” category of their May 2013 Technology Radar.
Play has been a primary driver of production use of the Typesafe Reactive Platform. We’ve published lots of new case studies this year that highlight Play’s appeal. Here are some of the quotes:
“We've found that Play is one of the few frameworks that is able to maintain the delicate balance of performance, reliability, and developer productivity.” - LinkedIn
“One of the key components of Gilt Live is the ability to send real-time messages to their members. Goldberg said they chose Play initially because of its scalability and support of WebSockets (a technology that allows bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels over a single TCP connection). It’s this functionality that enables Gilt Live’s real-time inventory updates.” - Gilt
“As a result of the amazing success that The Guardian has seen utilizing Scala and Play across multiple projects, their architectural standards now dictate Scala as the de facto language, and Play as the web front-end.” - The Guardian
“Akka is being used to populate search and other related indexes while Play is the framework for all of their web projects, as it proved to be flexible enough to use the components they need, and replace those they don't, while providing an easy deployment process. As of June 2013, all of the Gawker services were moved to Play, Akka, Slick and Scala.” - Gawker
“Having launched the API with Play 1.x, Klout quickly migrated to Play 2.0 as Typesafe announced its general availability shortly after the API launch. Play 2.0 offered the productivity of Play 1.0, along with the significant benefit of being built natively in Scala.” - Klout
We’ve also seen some great content about Play come out this year. Here are some articles and videos we really enjoyed:
We are really excited to see Play Framework taking off! To take Play for a spin build your first app in minutes with Typesafe Activator.
