In this short post about the recentl release of Play 2.8 and Lagom 1.6, we sit down with members of our engineering team to find out what there is to know.

Lightbend recently teamed with Groupon to tell the story of their adoption of Akka and Play Framework to solve issues of throughput, scalability, and resilience against downtime in their most critical systems.

We’re excited to release the latest version of Lightbend Enterprise Suite’s Monitoring/Telemetry, a.k.a. Cinnamon, which includes support for Play Framework 2.6+ metrics and tracing, a new Docker-based sandbox environment, and a new JVM metrics module, among other things.

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...

Today, we're excited to share a guest post by our customers at Visier, who provide end-to-end, cloud-based applications designed for HR professionals to answer critical workforce strategy questions. Visier is changing how enterprises approach analytics by delivering pre-built tools that combine the sophistication of predictive capabilities with the ease-of-use of consumer applications.

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.