Been there, done that. In the previous company I worked at, some new projects were done in Play. The result: frequent API changes in Play, bad Maven integration, illogical APIs from the Java perspective (an artefact of Play being written in Scala), little documentation, and I don't know how it is now, but back then it was very had to make a minimal REST application without pulling a lot of baggage in.
We rewrote these applications using JAX-RS (RESTEasy) and they were much simpler, easier to maintain, without API breakage in new framework versions. It just a bunch of methods with annotations. XML and JSON serialization is automatic (via JAXB and Jackson). And you can use the same lightweight ORM as Play (Ebean), since it's an external project.
Well-thought out, mature technology is often better for getting work done than the hype of the day.
I've just started using play for the last two weeks, but so far i really don't understand the critics on java vs scala or the documentation. True, so far i've only dealt with json. / db / file upload & download , but even that covers quite a vast area, and it was pretty obvious that every time play had both a simple and documented way of doing those , even in java.
We rewrote these applications using JAX-RS (RESTEasy) and they were much simpler, easier to maintain, without API breakage in new framework versions. It just a bunch of methods with annotations. XML and JSON serialization is automatic (via JAXB and Jackson). And you can use the same lightweight ORM as Play (Ebean), since it's an external project.
Well-thought out, mature technology is often better for getting work done than the hype of the day.