Play! Framework does away with the Java EE convention of packaging application artifacts as a single file, for easy distribution, in compressed archive formats (WAR/EAR) for ease of distribution(Although you can still 'war' the artifacts and deploy it on some other EE servers like Glassfish). Play! ,in a manner similar to Django or Rails, creates a folder hierarchy as the skeleton for the application ,which can easily be added as a new project in an IDE, and Play!'s server(Play! ships with an inbuilt server) recognizes the same hierarchy for deployment. This takes a sometimes time-consuming step ( that of building the war/ear using something like Ant) out of the equation; usually shortening the development time;but on the other hand complicating the distribution part.