Chapter 1. Getting Started with Play

The World Wide Web has grown by leaps and bounds since its first appearance in August 1991. It has come a long way from line mode browsers and static websites to graphical browsers and highly interactive websites, such as search engines, online department stores, social networking, gaming, and so on.

Complex websites or applications are backed by one or more databases and several lines of code. In most cases, such web applications use a framework to simplify the development process. A framework provides a skeleton structure that handles most of the repetitive or common features. Ruby on Rails, Django, Grails, and Play are a few examples of this.

Play Framework was developed by Guillaume Bort while he was working at Zenexity (now Zengularity). Its first full release was in October 2009 for version 1.0. In 2011, Sadek Drobi joined Guillaume Bort to develop Play 2.0, which was adopted by Typesafe Stack 2.0. Play 2.0 was released on March 13, 2012.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics: