I have been doing some analysis on Lift and Scala.  I really like it so far despite the drawbacks of poor code examples available online.  I also have some personal projects that I am working on at home and wanted to expand my knowledge of other frameworks so I decided to check out the Play! Framework.

I ran through the Learn link on the site for the new 1.1 framework.  It got me up and running in no time flat.  I was able to see the default page in a heart beat and it was very easy to go from zero to functional with minimal setup.

The two things that I wanted to accomplish were to find a framework that was easy to get running, that supported an MVC model and something with Scala support.

As I am a re-convert back into Java after spending almost a decade doing Microsoft development, I have really tried to immerse myself in more than just plain vanilla Java development.  I have found Scala to be a breadth of fresh air and a new challenge to help me dust off some of those idle brain cells.

To get Scala support with play you simply have to add the play (play.bat for windows or play for mac) into your class path.  For the Mac you also need to “chmod -x play” and “chmod 775 play” on the play file in there to make it executable as well.

After setting up Scala and looking at their docs, I started to discover some slight differences in what code is required to actually get their examples to work.  For example their code had the following code to access a Jpa class within a test.

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import models.User
import org.scalatest.matchers.ShouldMatchers
import play.test._

class SpecStyle extends UnitFlatSpec with ShouldMatchers {
"Creating a user" should "be succesfull" in {
 val user = new User("[email protected]", "secret", "Bob").save()
 val bob = User.find("byEmail", "[email protected]").first
 bob should not be (null)
 bob.fullname should be ("Bob")
 }
}

I had to use the following to get the code to run.  I am not sure if I did something wrong or of the example code was wrong but here is what I had to do to get it working.

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import models.User
import org.scalatest.matchers.ShouldMatchers
import play.test._

class SpecStyle extends UnitFlatSpec with ShouldMatchers {
"Creating a user" should "be succesfull" in {
 val user = new User("[email protected]", "secret", "Bob").save()
 val bob = User.find("byEmail", "[email protected]").first
 bob should not be (null)
 bob.get.fullname should be ("Bob")
 }
}

The only thing that is different is the fact that I had to call the get on bob.get.fullname as calling bob.firstname wasn’t getting me a User object that I could check properties on.  If anyone has any ideas on this by all means let me know.  Here is the user class/object.

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package models
import java.util._
import play.db.jpa._
import play.data.Validators._

@Entity
@Table(uniqueConstraints=Array(new UniqueConstraint(columnNames=Array("email"))))
class User(
 @Email
 @Required
 var email: String,

 @Required
 var password: String,
 var fullname: String
) extends Model {
 var isAdmin = false
 override def toString() = email
}

object User extends QueryOn[User] {
 def connect(email: String, password: String) = {
 find("byEmailAndPassword", email, password).first
 }
}

What I really love about the play framework is the integrated testing, especially with Selenium, that comes for free with the framework.  More on that to come soon.  I will post more code to get up and running, but the sample code on the play site is very easy to get you up and running.

On a side note, I have been using my Mac more and more for development I really like it now that I have a two button mouse… :)