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

Binding JSON and XML to objects


After you have explored Play a little bit and written your first apps, you might have noticed that it works excellently when binding complex Java objects out of request parameters, as you can put complex objects as controller method parameters. This type of post request deserialization is the default in Play. This recipe shows how to convert JSON and XML data into objects without changing any of your controller code.

The source code of the example is available at examples/chapter4/mashup-json-xml.

Getting ready

Let's start with a controller, which will not change and does not yield any surprises, as shown in the following code snippet:

public class Application extends Controller {

  public static void thing(Thing thing) {
    renderText("foo:"+thing.foo+"|bar:"+thing.bar+"\n");
  }
}

You should add a correct route for the controller as well in conf/routes

POST     /thing     Application.thing

Start with a test as usual:

public class ApplicationTest extends FunctionalTest...