Don't take my comment as "quit living in the past". Take it as "here's how exciting the future is". I'm not telling you your startac phone is crap, I'm telling you there's this great new thing called the iPhone/Android/smartphone.
The real benefits of Play and Akka become apparent when a third-party service you send API calls to starts acting flaky. Or when your web service that you offer to clients is suddenly being hit by an iPhone game that just got purchased by a million people. Or when that nasty little bug that winds up throwing an exception from time to time rears its head all of a sudden. Play and Akka give you a resilience that is very hard to come by in the Java world.
Typesafe's home page has, in giant type, "Applications are becoming Reactive" and they are absolutely spot f'ing on. Writing blocking code, waiting on threads, assuming you're running on one JVM, these things are great and all, and very easy to do because all of those templates are built into IntelliJ and you just have to click a few buttons to get all that, but wow, the performance difference once you get into the Play world is just frighteningly good.
The real benefits of Play and Akka become apparent when a third-party service you send API calls to starts acting flaky. Or when your web service that you offer to clients is suddenly being hit by an iPhone game that just got purchased by a million people. Or when that nasty little bug that winds up throwing an exception from time to time rears its head all of a sudden. Play and Akka give you a resilience that is very hard to come by in the Java world.
Typesafe's home page has, in giant type, "Applications are becoming Reactive" and they are absolutely spot f'ing on. Writing blocking code, waiting on threads, assuming you're running on one JVM, these things are great and all, and very easy to do because all of those templates are built into IntelliJ and you just have to click a few buttons to get all that, but wow, the performance difference once you get into the Play world is just frighteningly good.