The Play framework
The Play framework is a web framework built on top of Akka. It has a proven track record in industry, and is thus a reliable choice for building scalable web applications.
Play is an opinionated web framework: it expects you to follow the MVC architecture, and it has a strong opinion about the tools you should be using. It comes bundled with its own JSON and XML parsers, with its own tools for accessing external APIs, and with recommendations for how to access databases.
Web applications are much more complex than the command line scripts we have been developing in this book, because there are many more components: the backend code, routing information, HTML templates, JavaScript files, images, and so on. The Play framework makes strong assumptions about the directory structure for your project. Building that structure from scratch is both mind-numbingly boring and easy to get wrong. Fortunately, we can use Typesafe activators to bootstrap the project (you can also download...
