In this section, we are going to further experiment with Slick and Play by automatically creating a full Play application with basic CRUD functionality out of a relational database, including Models, Views, Controllers, as well as test data and configuration files such as Play routes.

Any web application that needs to connect to a database generally requires most of the CRUD functionality at least in the backend. Furthermore, being able to generate a default frontend can avoid you having to make one from scratch. In particular, a Play frontend consisting of HTML5 views is highly reusable since most of the display of columns, fields, buttons, and forms can be re-arranged with limited copy/paste in an HTML editor.

Let's apply this reverse engineering on the sample customer database from the NetBeans distribution that we have already covered in Chapter 2, Code Integration.

The generation of the Play app is done in two steps: