Book Image

Play Framework Cookbook

By : Alexander Reelsen
Book Image

Play Framework Cookbook

By: Alexander Reelsen

Overview of this book

<p>The Play framework is the new kid on the block of Java frameworks. By breaking with existing standards the play framework tries not to abstract away from HTTP as most web frameworks do, but tightly integrates with it. This means quite a shift for Java programmers. Understanding these concepts behind the play framework and its impact on web development with Java are crucial for fast development of applications.<br /><br />The Play Framework Cookbook starts where the beginner documentation ends. It shows you how to utilize advanced features of the Play framework &ndash; piece by piece and completely outlined with working applications!<br /><br />The reader will be taken through all layers of the Play Framework and provided with in-depth knowledge from as many examples and applications as possible. Leveraging the most from the Play framework means to think simple again in a java environment. Implement your own renderers, integrate tightly with HTTP, use existing code, improve site performance with caching and integrate with other web services and interfaces. Learn about non-functional issues like modularity or integration into production and testing environments. In order to provide the best learning experience during reading Play Framework Cookbook, almost every example is provided with source code, so you can start immediately to integrate recipes into your own play applications.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Play Framework Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Further Information About the Play Framework
Index

Managing different output formats


In the preceding examples another API was consumed. When your application gets more users, the demand to get data out of your application will not only rise in web pages. As soon as machine-to-machine communication is needed, you will need to provide an API yourself.

This recipe will show you how to implement your own APIs using the Play framework. If you need an API that exposes your data in as many data formats as possible, you might not be right with selecting the Play framework. Currently, it is not that generic. You might want to go with enunciate for example, which is reachable at http://enunciate.codehaus.org/

Find the accompanying source example at examples/chapter4/mashup-api.

Getting ready

There is some preliminary information you should know before implementing anything. Play already has a built-in mechanism for finding out what type of data to return. It checks the Accept header of the request and puts the result in the request.format variable inside...