(Java) Play! Framework vs. Java HTTP Server Class [closed]

I don't know anything about the Play! framework, but, unless you have a burning desire to write your own HTTP server, I would definitely go for a framework of some description.

If you were to split the work in to two chunks, the work required to write and test the HTTP server, and the work to implement the business logic, I'd guess that the work involved in writing your own server would outweigh the work required to develop the software that actually does the work your application relies upon.

Play provides a bunch of goodies out of the box, and the development environment is pretty sweet too. To test your changes, you simply refresh your browser, that's it.

The only exception is that when you change your configuration, such as Build.scala, you probably want to do a clean, sometimes you need to reload your eclipse project by running eclipse with-source=true.

There are at least two ways to deploy your job in production:

1. Use the Play start script

   When you run it in development environment, you use run

   When you run it in production environment, you use start

2. Create a war, and deploy it through Tomcat In Build.scala, you can have something like:

   val main = play.Project(projectName, projectVersion, appDependencies).settings(Play2WarPlugin.play2WarSettings: _*)
   

Your question is very general, so answers will be general too.

Play (in this post I will refer to version 2+) has many features built-in like router, sessions, memory-cache, DB support, job scheduler (Akka), MVC, etc, etc. I like to use Play to built public APIs, however in most of my cases these APIs are just an addition to some web-app.

If you plan a large traffic on this API (from many clients, with many calls per second) that would be good choice, as you can make good usage of the described elements (cache would be most interesting feature in this case).

On the other hand, Play's small app with all basic libs weights ~50mb, so if you plan to publish really simple API which will render single data set and it need to serve only few request a day, maybe simple construction will be just easier and lighter solution?

Finally: Play works on it's own server and it's best option, it's fast, built-in, doesn't require any additional config, just dist your new app and run it on some port. If you definitely want/need to deploy your application as a WAR you can do it. Although Play 2.x has NOT built-in WAR support, you can use a plugin dedicated to this : https://github.com/dlecan/play2-war-plugin/