With major enterprises such as LinkedIn, Verizon, Samsung, Weight Watchers and Norwegian Cruise Lines using Play Framework in production, we felt it would be interesting to invite Will back to our podcast program so that he could describe, at a deep technical level, what exactly makes Play Framework one of the fastest JVM web frameworks on the market...

On behalf of the Play team here at Typesafe, I'm proud to announce the release of Play 2.4.0, named “Damiya”. The focus of this release has been dependency injection, allowing Play apps to natively be written in a way that allows loose coupling between components.  This makes the apps easier to test, and paves the way for our plans to remove global state in Play 3.

Inspired by the introduction of functional features in Java 8, namely lambdas, it's even easier than before for Java developers to embrace tools designed for building distributed systems that deliver highly-responsive user experiences. Regardless of whether you code in Java or Scala, Typesafe Reactive Platform, including Play and Akka, provides a resilient and message-driven application stack that scales effortlessly on multicore and cloud computing architectures.

Anyone who has worked with Play Framework will tell you that it's fast. Play, which was recently ranked in a RebelLabs report as the 6th most-used web framework among Java developers, does all it can to wring every last drop of performance out of the JVM. The big question is how, and why, is Play able to be so fast?  

The Play team has been hard at work on Play 2.4 for almost a year now.  With a release scheduled for Q2, we’re coming to the final stages, about to release the last milestone, and looking toward the RC phase of the project.  The headline feature ofPlay 2.4 is dependency injection support from the core.  This is part of a larger plan to eventually remove Play’s reliance on global state (the “current” application), allowing more flexible deployment and simpler testing of Play applications.

Our newest case study is with Nitro, a company whose software make it easy to create, edit, share, sign and collaborate with documents—online or offline. In our recent interview, Nitro's VP of Technology, Tihomir Bajic, outlines the importance of Play, Akka and Scala to the company’s product delivery evolution during their recent years of explosive growth. Back in 2011, Nitro had millions of users and a massive code base of C++ for desktop apps for document processing and workflows. Nitro’s desktop products were supported by .NET.

Today we are excited to share a new case study with our friends at Hootsuite, a widely used social media relationship platform. This specific use case focuses on Ow.ly, Hootsuite’s popular URL shortening and click analytics service. Essentially, the tool became so popular and such a critical part of the Hootsuite product, that the the engineering team found themselves dedicating much more time and cost into keeping the service performant and reliable than they expected.

A curious thing. At training events, hackathons and any chance I get I have started asking people what they think of Activator. There are a range of different answers, usually followed by questions once the subject has been broached.

The questions are varied, but over a large enough sample size, surprisingly consistent. It seems that Activator is a fairly misunderstood tool, and it’s not just me who noticed. This blog post will attempt to address those frequently asked questions and even if it doesn’t convince you that Activator is your new best friend, at least you might consider keeping it in your toolbox.

We're really excited to share the work we've been doing with the team at PredictionIO, a popular open source Machine Learning server that developers use to create “predictive” features in web and mobile applications. Showcased as one of the featured machine learning products on GitHub, PredictionIO 
powers hundreds of applications for its community of more than 5,000 developers. That’s pretty amazing adoption for a product that’s less than two years old.

Today we're excited to share a new success story with Spendgo, a San Francisco-based technology startup innovating customer loyalty at the point-of-sale (POS).  If you’ve bought a Razzmatazz or Caribbean Passion smoothie recently, you’ve probably already interacted with Spendgo. 

Are you interested in getting started with the Typesafe Reactive Platform but don’t know where to begin? Have you heard about Akka and Play Framework, but don’t know if either is right for your application needs? Join us for this three-part webinar series all about Activator, Play, Akka, and our surrounding ecosystem to better understand how all the pieces work together and start building reactive apps with confidence!

In our newest case study, Datazenit, web-based software for database management and administration, share their successes swapping out a Python/Django back end for Scala and Play Framework.

Today we’re excited to announce an Activator partner integration release that makes it easy to add production monitoring of Reactive apps with AppDynamics and New Relic.

Today we’ve published a short white paper (actually it’s blue…), Introducing the Typesafe Reactive Platform. It offers a guide to Typesafe, a map of our ecosystem and additional resources for education and exploration. The aim of the white paper is to familiarize developers, enterprise architects, dev managers, CTOs, and others with Typesafe technologies and how they are used to build Reactive apps.

Earlier this week, Grant Klopper from The Guardian upgraded part of their news website from Play 2.2 to Play 2.3.  Shortly after he noticed and tweeted about a significant change - response times and memory usage had both dropped by a factor of three. A few days later, he tweeted “I shut down 2/3 of the servers and got CPU back to where it was 2 days ago.”

Today, we're excited to share a new case study with Kifi, an innovative startup that is creating a new way to search the Internet and store or share information. 

On Tuesday, June 3rd we hosted a full day of webinars all about the Play Framework, featuring speakers from the Typesafe Play team, BBC, Walmart.ca, Huffington Post, Angie’s List, and Gilt. 

The Play team is proud to announce the release of Play 2.3.0! This is a huge release, incorporating a lot of hard work from different teams and over 150 individuals on GitHub.

Join us for Play Day, our first ever virtual conference on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014. We’re hosting a full day of webinars all about the Play Framework! Speakers from the Typesafe Play team, Huffington Post, Angie’s List, Gilt and more will share their experiences with Play.

We've recently had some questions about Typesafe Activator and how it relates to other projects on the Typesafe Platform, such as Scala, Akka, Play Framework, and sbt. The tool has evolved a lot since we launched it over a year ago, both in use cases and features, and we're continually working on improvements to make it the best way to get started with our technology.

Today we're excited to announce two new customer success stories, Tomax and Walmart Canada! Both cases support the traction reactive programming has made in the retail and ecommerce space, particularly when paired with Gilt's case study, which we published several months ago. Below is a quick summary of the accounts, we encourage you to read all three case studies to see how Typesafe's technologies are powering a new wave of retail apps!

In case you missed our recent post Go Reactive with Java 8 or the follow-up webinar, a stable release of Java 8 is now available and is supported by the Play Framework. Some of the new Java features lend themselves well to developing Reactive applications with Play, and I’ll show you how to use them.

Yesterday we hosted a webinar, "Going Reactive with Java 8," which explored how lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner.

We are very excited about the release of Java 8!  The new Lambda syntax makes it much easier for Java developers to go Reactive. The foundation of Reactive is Event-Driven. To be Event Driven you need an easy way to create and spawn up small independent tasks in an asynchronous fashion. Lambdas gives us exactly this, avoiding the usual anonymous inner classes that make code hard to comprehend. Combining Lambdas with Akka and Play Framework create a concise and cohesive programming model for Reactive applications on the JVM.

We launched a store, featuring sweet new designs for Scala, Akka, Play Framework and Activator!  Order swag for meetups, buy gifts for team members, or just show off your Reactive style by wearing a customized shirt or hoodie. We’ll be adding more items periodically, so check back in for new gear. 

We're excited to share a new case study that chronicles how the Huffington Post, a leading online news source, built a new integrated platform to propel them through the next stage of their skyrocketing growth with the Typesafe Reactive Platform. Adam Denenberg, Huffington Post’s VP of Engineering, wanted to prepare for the next wave of users who create thousands of hours of video, billions of Likes, and millions of tweets each day. 

A big thanks to the folks at Coursera for telling their success story in our newest case study, "Making online education accessible with Typesafe." Coursera's popular online education service delivers high quality classes directly to users desktops, and turned the company into an overnight success. Delivering any service in a scalable, seamless manner however, is hard to do without the right tools. Coursera decided to utilize the Typesafe Reactive Platform to handle the massive scale and concurrency issues they faced. 

It's Typesafe Day at Manning Publications! Save 50% on selected books covering Scala, Play, Akka, and other related technologies. Just enter tsdotd14 in the Promotional Code box when you check out at manning.com to save half. The offer expires at midnight EST December 19, 2013.

Hot off the presses, our newest case study with the team at Janrain! Thomas Lockney, software engineer at Janrain, talks about how the Typesafe Reactive Platform helps scale Janrain's User Management Platform. The study outlines how Janrain selected Scala for two standard “stacks” that Thomas' team utilizes: Akka with Spray for Web Services, and Play Web Framework for user interface development. 

This week, James Ward hosted a webinar, Optimizing Play for Production.  In the presentation, James teaches you the basics of Play Framework deployment, configuring thread pools, managing blocking and common performance pitfalls to keep things running smoothly.  

Play Framework has grown in leaps and bounds in 2013!  Not only has Play seen wide adoption in internet and social companies like LinkedIn, Klout, Gilt Groupe and Gawker Media, but recently more and more traditional enterprise shops are turning to the framework for its focus on developer productivity, reactive & modern web apps, and its usability with Scala and Java.

We are happy to announce the first milestone for Scala IDE 4.0.0! This is the first step towards the Lithium release, and sets the stage for future improvements in the API for plugin writers.

We are happy to announce the second release candidate for Scala IDE 3.0.2. As usual, it comes with Play support, Scala Search, ScalaTest and Scala Worksheet plug-ins.

Our newest case study outlines how Auvik Networks is using the Typesafe Platform to build a radically simple, cloud-managed network automation platform to alleviate pains of computer networking. In the network world, managing an enterprise network can be complex and full of headaches and there are lots of technologies at play – VLAN’s, routes, dynamic routes, ACL’s, etc. Expecting an IT professional to develop a massively distributed system that encompasses hundreds of different nodes with numerous criteria to write all the business logic is an extremely challenging proposition.

After Gawker Media made the move to consolidate a previously fragmented infrastructure under a JVM based umbrella, they selected the Typesafe Platform as a natural choice to help manage their extreme scalability requirements. Gawker experiences over 80 million unique page visitors monthly, produces eight original brands with a collective audience of tens of millions of US readers, and has a development team split between the US and Europe- needless to say scale and a robust platform are necessities to help manage growth!

47 Degrees is a software development and creative agency focused on the development of native mobile apps and highly scalable back-ends and API’s. In order to meet the unpredictable scaling requirements of their diverse client base, the company decided to switch from Java back-ends based on Spring, to Scala and the Typesfe Platform. The initial choice to adopt Scala was simle for 47 Degrees- being a Java shop, the team knew Scala could allow them to leverage and reuse many of their existing Java libraries and make a gradual migration of their current code bases while boosting developer productivity.

In an effort to deliver a robust system that would enable marketers and advertisers to consistently reach consumers across multiple devices, Tapad selected the Lightbend Platform to accomplish this monumental task. Tapad has proven to be a leader in cross-screen advertising technology, adddressing the new and ever-evolving reality of media consumption on smartphones, tablets and home computers.

In our newest case study, Tindr discusses the future of note taking with Knowtaker, built with the Typesafe Platform. Knowtaker vision is to revolutionize digital note taking by automatically pulling important phrases and reminders out of your notes and placing them front and center in your day-to-day life. 

Cake Solutions, an enterprise software solutions provider that architects and implements modern software for organizations, is on the Scala track! Cake aims to be well ahead of the technology curve by constantly evaluating the marketplace for products worthy of inclusion in their portfolio. This method offers Cake Solutions’ clients the very latest technology and equips their businesses with a technical competitive edge. The Typesafe Platform is a perfect example of a modern tool that Cake Solutions implements and uses to offer clients these advantages.

Knowing in real-time how your web applications are performing and what the bottlenecks are is crucial. New Relic is a cloud service that does just that by instrumenting applications and feeding analytics to its rich visualization dashboard. Typesafe is very excited that New Relic has added support for Play Framework 2.x for Java and Scala apps!

Our newest case study discusses how a company made the switch from Ruby to Scala in order to meet the requirements of their next generation native advertising platform.

Our own Jamie Allen recently travelled to South America to spend time with the amazing Typesafe developer community while attending conferences and meetups. He shared an awesome write up of his travels below! Thanks, Jamie for sharing...

Last week the community contributed two new Typesafe Activator templates that are helping developers learn how to build modern web apps with the Typesafe Platform. Matthias Nehlsen's SSE Chat Template with AngularJS template and Jan Machacek's Akka and Spray template are fantastic additions to the growing list of Activator templates.

In our most recent case study, simpleBI shares how they're changing the way people view, use and implement Business Intelligence with the Typesafe Platform and Tindr.

Today we're excited to share a new Typesafe case study, courtesy of the folks at Klout! Klout has been the leader in measuring online influence by calculating a user's social impact through extensive data mining.

We all know the newspaper industry has been in a steady transition from print to digital since the web transformed the way readers consume and journalists share news. The Guardian is a UK-based newspaper that has been at the forefront of this transformation, changing from a print-based organization to one that is digital-first in philosophy and practice. Implementing this new strategy has involved a series of bold changes not only to the way they do things, but with the tools and software they used to accomplish these tasks.