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§Hello World Tutorial

This tutorial describes how Play applications work, and shows you how to create a page that displays a customized Hello World greeting.

You can use any Java build tool to build a Play project. This tutorial demonstrates sbt and Gradle because they both provide the development experience Play is known and loved for, such as auto-reloading, clear error messages, and template compilation. The tutorial procedures assume use of sbt or gradlew commands from a terminal, but you can also integrate Play projects with your favorite IDE.

§Starting the project

Before following the tutorial instructions:

1. Make sure you have verified the requirements for running Play
2. Obtain the appropriate example zip file:
   1. Play Java Starter Example
   2. Play Scala Starter Example
3. Unzip and run the example following the steps in the README.md file.

§Introduction to Play

As illustrated below, Play is a full-stack framework with all of the components you need to build a Web Application or a REST service, including: an integrated HTTP server, form handling, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection, a powerful routing mechanism, I18n support, and more. Play integrates with many object relational mapping (ORM) layers. It supports Anorm, Ebean, Slick, and JPA out-of-the-box, but many customers use NoSQL, other ORMs or even access data from a REST service.

Play APIs are available in both Java and Scala. The Framework uses Akka and Akka HTTP under the hood. This endows Play applications with a stateless, non-blocking, event-driven architecture that provides horizontal and vertical scalability and uses resources more efficiently. Play projects contain Scala components, but because Play has a Java API, you do not need to learn Scala to use Play successfully if you are a Java developer.

Here are just a few of the reasons developers love using Play Framework:

• Its Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture is familiar and easy to learn.
• Direct support of common web development tasks and hot reloading saves precious development time.
• A large active community that promotes knowledge sharing.
• Use of Twirl templates to render pages. The Twirl template language is:
• Easy to learn
• Requires no special editor
• Provides type safety
• Is compiled so that errors display in the browser

To learn more about Play’s benefits, see Play’s Introduction and Philosophy. Now, let’s dive into what a Play application looks like.

Next: Play Application Overview